Fact or Fiction
by Mertiya
Summary: It's Ral Zarek's sixth year at Hogwarts. And everything would be fine if Jace wasn't totally occupied with his new girlfriend, to the point where it's honestly kind of weird, and Ral's starting to be concerned. Now if only everyone would stop telling Ral he's just jealous and LISTEN to him...after all, he's NOT just jealous, right? Sequel to "Send to Sleep."
1. Prologue

**A/N:** Many, many thanks to paperclipminimizer for beta-ing and checking my timeline, as well as answering all my questions about Harry Potter. Thanks also to Juri, FrostandSilence, and everyone on Sketchydoodles' Vorthos server for listening to me rant about this thing as it took shape.

 **Prologue**

 _Eight years before Jace Beleren arrived at Hogwarts…_

"Hurry up, can't you!" Bellatrix Lestrange snarled at the nearest Death-Eater, a short, fat wizard who cringed away under her sudden attention.

"I-I'm sorry, Madame Lestrange, we're working as quickly as possible." He ducked his head. "As you know, the charms are numerous, and our best records indicate they were put in place by Merlin himself."

"The Dark Lord does not care for excuses," Lestrange said sweetly. "Work faster, or I will see that you can no longer work at all."

"Yes—yes, Madame, of course." His face was invisible behind the metal mask he wore, but dark sweat stains were visible along the armpits of his dark robe. He turned back to the work crew. "Faster!" he called, in a voice fearfully climbing to a new octave.

As Lestrange watched, the circle of witches and wizards tightened around the massive block of stone that lay in the center of a fairy circle, almost hidden by moss and heather. As someone took a too-eager step forward, hot white light flashed, and the unfortunate witch screamed, staggering backward.

" _Stupefy_!" Bellatrix snapped her wand out and knocked out the woman who had tripped the trap, not allowing her to leave the circle. The stench of burning flesh filled the air. "It seems we missed one," she said lightly, tracing an intricate rune in the air with the tip of her wand. Blood red smoke seeped from the fairy circle, swirling slowly and lazily toward her. "Interesting," she squealed excitedly. "Merlin, Merlin, Merlin, you have so _many_ beautiful tricks up your sleeves!"

"Madame Lestrange—Karloff is—"

"Yes, yes, that's not important now. I think this is the last one." She focused, licking her lips, mouthing the words to an especially complicated spell. In some ways it was lucky these protections were so old, because it meant that in the centuries since they had been put in place, a number of people nearly as clever as Merlin had worked out ways to get around them. In other ways, well—some of these were so old that they had been caught unawares. Bellatrix's lips curved into a smile. She could certainly appreciate the viciousness of some of Merlin's techniques. And they hadn't lost too many people.

The smoke darted upward suddenly, and she caught it on the end of her wand, grimacing faintly. A burning sensation ran up her arm, halting at her Dark Mark and twisting around it. She shook off the pain, flicking her wand again, and now a streak of white crept down her wand and into the smoke, diffusing slowly at first, then faster and faster. There was a loud, explosive noise, and the ground beneath the fairy ring cracked open. Bellatrix let out another excited screech. She'd been _right_. The Dark Lord would be so pleased with her!

" _Eorthstyr_ ," she gabbled happily, jabbing her wand at the stone inside the fairy ring. "Get back!" she snapped at the surprised Death-Eaters, and they scattered.

Beneath the pressure of her wand, the stone in the center of the fairy ring melted to mud and began to drain away, revealing a casket of clouded glass several feet below the ground. Etched into the center was unmistakably the seal of Merlin, and beneath it, a few lines of something that was probably Welsh. Bellatrix frowned in concentration, whispering beneath her breath as she translated, " _Do not awaken the sleeper in stone_." She laughed. "Sorry, Merlin, I don't take orders from wizards who have been dead for more than thirty years." She stepped forward, ignoring the mud that clung to the bottom of her robe, and held out her wand, knocking it loudly against the casket three times. " _Rennervate maxima!_ "


	2. Defense of the Heart

**Chapter One: Defense of the Heart**

 _Beep-beep-beep. Beep-beep-beep._ The loud sound in Elspeth's ear dragged her eyes open and had her out of bed and clutching for her wand before she remembered where she was, sighed, and collapsed back with a groan. Every single morning. This entire summer. _Every single morning_.

Despite the fact that she had been staying at Ral's house for over two weeks now, she still hadn't gotten used to the alarm clock. It wasn't as if it was that much louder than the bell at school, it was just blaring and angry in a way that did not agree with her brain, although she had to admit it was very good at getting her out of bed. Of course it also meant she tended to start the day with mild heart palpitations.

After she had brushed her teeth and her hair, she pulled on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, which she actually did prefer to robes, and headed down the stairs for breakfast. "Good morning, Natalka," she said, and Ral's mother looked up briefly from her newspaper.

"Good morning," she said. Natalka Zarek was a professor of history at Oxford University, and despite being a compact, intimidating woman, she had been very supportive when Ral asked if one of his best friends could stay with them over the summer as part of her independent project for Muggle Studies. The first week at Ral's house had been significantly more challenging than Elspeth had thought. The Zarek household's technology had not adapted well to having two young, powerful wizards near it, and Elspeth and Ral had spent a significant amount of time down in Ral's parents' workshop in the basement, Ral trying to finesse some of his favorite items into working, Elspeth just reading up Muggle children's science books so that when she was around the rest of the house, she could manage to get the basics to function.

"Eggs, Betta?" Alexei Zarek, Ral's father, stood over the frying pan. A professor of music at Oxford, he also made the best fried eggs Elspeth had ever had, and never seemed to remember to call her anything but 'Betta'. Elspeth had stopped correcting him after the first week and a half. Ral seemed to find it hilarious anyway.

"Thanks, I'd love some," she answered, then headed over to the window to check whether she'd received an owl the night before.

She had. The large, tawny bird shuffled sleepily along its perch on the window outside the Zareks' kitchen and fixed her with one golden eye. When she had started exchanging letters with her pen pal two years ago, Achilles had been standoffish and hostile, even trying to peck her fingers once or twice. Now he butted her hand affectionately and nibbled at a stray strand of hair. Elspeth headed to the freezer and liberated one of the dead mice she kept there for him. He took it and swallowed gustily as she removed the letter from his claws.

"I've got one for you to take back to her as well, all right? Just a minute."

Though normally Elspeth left her letters for her pen pal on her desk, she had been tired enough the night before to forget her most recent one on the desk in the cellar. She clattered down the stairs and glanced around, trying to remember where she'd been writing it. There was light streaming out from under the door of the workshop, and Elspeth shook her head, sighing, then headed in.

Sure enough, Ral was collapsed over the old laptop at a desk in the corner. The electric light in the corner of the room flickered as Elspeth came too close, and she checked her jeans and pulled a face when she realized she still had her wand in her right-hand pocket. Ral wouldn't have been happy if she'd come near the computer with it. Wands tended to drain energy rather indiscriminately from their surroundings—there were some technical details that Elspeth wasn't really interested in, but Ral and Professor Granger went into raptures over. She paused and leaned her wand carefully on the wall inside by the door and then went over to shake Ral awake.

Usually, Ral was impossible to wake up, especially when he'd stayed up until three am tinkering in the workshop, but today, his bloodshot eyes flew open as soon as Elspeth touched his arm. There were great dark circles under them, and Elspeth paused to think she really needed to get him to start sleeping. No matter how much Ral enjoyed theatrically complaining that he hadn't been able to sleep because he had "too many ideas", he usually didn't look this bad.

Ral grabbed her shoulder and dragged her toward him, and Elspeth instinctively opened her arms. The amount of physical contact in their relationship was probably a bit unusual, but Elspeth and Jace both tended to require physical grounding at times, and Ral's immigrant family was more prone to casual touching than most. Usually, it wasn't Ral who made a wordless, desperate plea for comfort, but there was nothing unclear about the motion now.

Elspeth found herself pulled into his lap as he wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her shoulder. Wordlessly, she stroked his head and made a soft, comforting noise. They sat like that for several minutes before Ral heaved a huge sigh and looked up at her with a forced smile. "Sorry," he mumbled awkwardly. He half-moved, but didn't quite push her off, instead making an abortive leaning-up motion so that his face was just inches away from hers.

There had been a few other similar awkward moments over the summer. Actually, Elspeth was surprised that they hadn't been more awkward. She was fairly sure that sixteen was well past when crazy teenage hormones were supposed to be kicking in, but she hadn't really noticed many. Certainly not around Ral or Jace, and she didn't really get physically close to anyone else.

This ought to be awkward, but mostly she just felt—

Ral kissed her. Okay, now things were awkward. She tried to kiss back, more out of a feeling that she probably should than out of any real desire on her part. It didn't quite work. Ral's tongue definitely ended up in her mouth, and she managed to get one hand on the back of his head, but it just felt—off. It was too much like snogging her brother, which was a disturbing enough thought for her to stand up quickly, pressing her hand to her lips. Ral was doing the same thing.

"Oh, shit," he said.

"Um," said Elspeth. "I don't think—"

"I think I'm gay."

"What?"

"I mean, you're—uh—you know—attractive and stuff," Ral blurted. "But kissing you just doesn't—do it."

Elspeth stared at him and then thought back to the warm feeling in the pit of her stomach when she'd open a letter from her pen pal and seen her for the first time. "Oh, Merlin," she said limply.

"Did I break your heart?" Ral asked, and he sounded so pitiful that she burst out laughing. He scowled at her. "Hey, I was legitimately worried!"

"I think I might be gay, too."

" _What?_ "

Elspeth bit her lip. "It never really occurred to me before? But it makes some sense. My pen pal—"

"—that you never shut up about—"

"—just like you never shut up about Jace—"

"—hey, I may be gay but I'm not crushing on my best friend!"

She raised her eyebrows at him.

"Much." Ral sulked, turning back to the computer screen. "I'll be up for breakfast in a minute."

"All right." Elspeth reached out and ruffled his hair, snagged the envelope of the end of the desk, and was turning to go when Ral grabbed her wrist.

When she looked back, he was studiously staring at the desk. "We're, uh, good, right?"

"Of course," she said immediately. "Just don't try to snog me again."

"Yeah, there's no chance of that." He paused. "Uh, no offense."

"Just get yourself up for breakfast before I come back down and hit you with a spoon."

* * *

Ral chewed on his lip as he watched Elspeth clatter out of the room. Well, that could have gone worse. What the fuck had he even been thinking? He turned moodily back to his laptop and clicked over into the Pidgin window he'd fallen asleep staring at last night.

 **Littleboyblue7900 (June 30, 9:15 pm)**

france is beautiful

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (June 30, 9:16 pm)**

how are you?

i miss you

 **Littleboyblue7900 (June 30, 9:16 pm)**

i made a new friend

also there's a lot of good food

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (June 30, 9:16 pm)**

trust you to pay attention to important things

i bet you ate so much chocolate you got sick

 **Littleboyblue7900 (June 30, 9:17 pm)**

i didn't get that sick

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (June 30, 9:17 pm)**

oh my god you did

what did ranna say

 **Littleboyblue7900 (June 30, 9:17 pm)**

my mum was very nice about it

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (June 30, 9:19 pm)**

did you tell her that elspeth and i had to hold your head over the toilet after last new year's while you threw up three chocolate puddings and five butterbeers

 **Littleboyblue7900 (June 30, 9:19 pm)**

are you blackmailing me :P

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (June 30, 9:20 pm)**

of course not, i'm just reminding you to be grateful to me ;)

 **Littleboyblue7900 (June 30, 9:21 pm)**

that sounds more dangerous than blackmail

i miss you too ral 3

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (June 30, 9:23 pm)**

did you seriously send me a fucking heart beleren

are you saying you fancy me :P

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (June 30, 9:30 pm)**

haha

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (June 30, 9:43 pm)**

jace?

did you fall asleep on the keyboard again?

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (June 30, 9:50 pm)**

did ranna take you out to a play?

i was just fucking with you, you know that right

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (June 31, 10:23 pm)**

okay i'm going to assume you fell asleep

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (June 31, 1:48 am)**

mate you've got to stop doing that

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (July 2, 4:04 am)**

hey are you alive out there?

you can send me an owl if your computer's fucking up

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (July 3, 3:57 am)**

for fuck's sake jace

why the hell did you stop getting back to me

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (July 3, 5:17 am)**

sorry for snapping

i miss you

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (July 5, 6:00 am)**

sorry if i made you mad somehow

just get back to me

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (July 6, 2:38 am)**

hi?

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (July 7, 9:45 pm)**

Hi?

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (July 8, 3:43 pm)**

hello?

 **nivmizzetdragonspet (July 9, 4:47 am)**

jace why aren't you responding to me anymore

* * *

Hermione stood in a corner, trying to tug discretely at the hem of her short red dress. Why she had thought a Muggle cocktail dress was a good outfit to wear to a DA reunion, she was honestly unsure. There was a small, niggling part of her that suggested that she had been trying to make Ron jealous, which was stupid, since they hadn't been an item in over seven years. She hadn't really talked to him since, either. Oh, they had corresponded—stilted, formal letters inquiring how the other person was doing, etc, but their friendship had never really recovered. Ron was Harry's friend now, a thought which made Hermione sigh and reach for her glass of champagne.

She didn't want to be Ron's girlfriend, she knew that, and that had been all that had been on her mind all those years ago, when she stormed away from him after the shouting match they'd had in front of Draco. She hadn't thought about the fact that she did, in fact, still want to be his friend. Losing that hurt, as if the last of her childhood had been ripped away.

There he was. Hermione's heart jumped into her throat. Ron was wearing nicely-trimmed black robes, his hair was combed, and he looked almost put-together. He looked across the room, eyes landing on Hermione, and he gave her a cautious half-smile. Hand clutching at her glass, Hermione found herself rapidly downing her champagne. The alcohol burned in her throat and landed with what felt like a physical thump in her stomach. No, she was definitely not ready for this meeting. Time to go.

One last glance at Ron—she saw that his face had fallen with disappointment and a little frustration, and she felt a twinge of guilt, but it wasn't enough to stop her from making a beeline for the lady's washroom, where she leaned dizzily against the wall before remembering that she was probably get her nice new dress all dirty.

"Oh, hello, Hermione," said a gentle and surprisingly unsurprised voice. "I didn't expect to see you hiding in the loo as well."

Hermione nearly jumped out of her skin. She whirled around to see Luna Lovegood perched with the seat down in an open stall, her knees drawn up to her chest.

"What are you doing here?" Hermione asked, then realized that the question came across as sounding rather more accusatory than she had intended, but Luna just blinked at her, pursed her lips, and let her eyes wander up to the ceiling as if she were thinking very hard.

"I got nervous," she said eventually. "I think it was a little silly, really, but I just didn't want to see everyone after all."

"We haven't really been all back together in years," Hermione agreed. "It's quite odd."

"Yes, and I think Ron was looking for you," Luna agreed, genially.

Hermione winced. "I ought to talk to him…" she hedged, then swallowed. "I suppose I want to, but at the same time, I really don't." Luna nodded, her gaze still fixed slightly to the side of Hermione's ear, and Hermione suddenly wondered if Luna was nervous to see her as well. "I apologize, I didn't mean to intrude," she said awkwardly.

"Well, it _is_ a public restroom." Luna twisted a hand in her long, blond hair. "Someone might have needed to use it, anyway." She put her hands behind her head, now staring very definitely at the ceiling. "Hermione," she said, and Hermione felt a strange jolt run through her. She hadn't seen Luna in over a year now; although they had been sporadically meeting up for coffee since the war ended, Luna had recently gone on a long trip, drawn by her work as a naturalist, and Hermione hadn't even realized she was back in Britain until she'd seen her name listed among the RSVPs for the DA reunion. Somehow, she felt as if she should have known.

"What?" she blurted, realizing she had taken too long to respond, but Luna merely blinked and spoke as if there hadn't been a pause.

"Do you remember a few years ago when you asked me to do some guest lectures for the herbology students?"

"Um," said Hermione. "Yes, I think so." Her mind was churning in odd loops. Surely the champagne shouldn't have been that effective? She hadn't eaten since breakfast, she supposed, but still…her gaze kept being drawn to Luna's hair, like loops of fine gold puffed about her shoulders.

"I said I didn't have time," Luna said. "I think I do now. If you still think that it would be helpful."

"Oh," said Hermione, pushing herself into a standing position and stumbling a few steps toward her friend. "Yes, I think it would be quite a valuable endeavor."

Luna's gaze flickered down, and Hermione felt as if she'd been struck as Luna's grey eyes met hers. She put a hand out to steady herself, and the hand landed on Luna's shoulder. Luna just kept looking at her, an unreadable expression on her thin face.

Hermione shut her eyes. "I'm sorry," she said numbly, though she didn't know what she was apologizing for. "I think I've had a bit too much to drink."

A faint sigh and a shaky laugh. "I'd better see you home."

"Thanks," Hermione said, without moving her hand. Luna's shoulder beneath it was round and warm.


	3. Emmara Tandris

**Chapter Two: Emmara Tandris**

Ral stalked back and forth impatiently. "He said he'd be here!" he complained to Elspeth. "So where is he?"

Two days before school reconvened and almost two weeks after Ral had despairingly given him up for dead, Jace had sent a hurried scrawl by owl saying that he'd be seeing them at Platform 9 ¾ before school started. Nothing else. Ral was torn between wanting to hug him and wanting to punch him for not apologizing. Honestly, who just dropped off the face of the planet like that? They'd been chatting _every fucking night_. And then nothing.

"Calm down," Elspeth said.

"I'm calm," Ral retorted. "I'm very calm. I'm just asking a perfectly simple question. Where the _fuck_ is Jace?"

"Oh, yes, you sound calm." Elspeth put a comforting hand on his back. "He'll be here. He's not going to miss the train."

"Of course I'm not going to miss the train." Ral's heart thudded once, hard, then jumped into his throat as Jace appeared through the brick wall separating 9 ¾ from the other platforms. With him was a girl that Ral didn't recognize, a short, blond, very glamorous looking girl with a heart-shaped face, flawless makeup, and very large breasts. Ral's heart sank, and then sank again as he saw that Jace and she were holding hands. "Hi," Jace said with a smile.

"Why didn't you get back to me?" Ral snapped. The girl at Jace's elbow flinched slightly at his strident tone, and Jace frowned.

"I was busy," he said vaguely. "Sorry."

"We were talking every night!" Ral was aware his voice was starting to rise. "You just _stopped_!" The wood of his wand was hot beneath his hand.

Jace frowned again. "I'm sorry," he said uncertainly. "I didn't mean to upset you."

Elspeth's hand squeezed at Ral's shoulder. "It's fine, I'm sure you were busy," she said, though she also sounded faintly disappointed.

"Yeah," Jace agreed, then looked back to the girl at his side, and Ral's heart flopped down heavily into the base of his stomach at the expression that spread across his friend's face. "This is Emmara," Jace continued. "We met over the summer in France. She's a transfer student. We, um, we're—" _no no no don't say it please Jace_ "—kind of dating."

Something burst into crackling heat around the base of Ral's wand, and he jumped in surprise. The feeling—almost static electricity—brought another nagging worry to the forefront of his mind. "Where's Kallist?" he asked suddenly. Sometimes the little cloud hid when he was nervous, but never for this long.

"I left him at home." Jace shrugged. "I didn't really need him trailing after me this year."

"What the fuck?" Ral asked in bewilderment. "Jace, you don't go anywhere without—"

"He's fine," Jace cut in, sounding almost defensive, and the girl beside him—Emmara—squeezed his arm. "Look, don't you want to say hi to my—to Emmara?"

"It's so nice to meet you," the blond girl murmured, hanging on to Jace's arm in a way Ral was pretty sure was geared to squash her breasts against it. "Jace has told me so much about you two."

Again, that strange sensation of crackling heat on his hand. "Nice to meet you, too," Elspeth was saying. Ral mumbled something unintelligible about needing to use the loo, because he was starting to be afraid there was actually something wrong with him.

"Be back in a minute," he got out and practically ran for the lavatory door. Once there, he bent over the toilet, trying to decide if he was going to be sick. Or if he'd hurt his hand. He pulled it out of his robes and inspected both it and his wand, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The hand should have looked swollen or something, Ral thought, but it didn't. It was just tingling oddly now, feeling warm and overfull. He leaned his head against the side of the stall, trying to steady his breathing. His stomach was still hurting.

The door of the restroom opened behind him, and he turned rapidly.

"Are you okay?" Jace leaned awkwardly against the lintel of the door.

"Of course I'm okay," Ral snapped. "What about you?"

Jace shuffled his feet. "You just ran off so suddenly," he said. "Is your hand all right?"

"It's fine." Ral tried to hide it automatically, but he was too slow. In another moment, Jace was in the bathroom, taking his hand in a way that was too gentle. Ral's stomach lurched, and he hissed in pain. Pins and needles radiated outward in the wake of Jace's hand.

"Sorry!" Jace jerked back. "I just wanted to—um—"

"Whatever, Jace," Ral said harshly. "You were too busy with your shiny new girlfriend to message me. I get it." The pins and needles feeling intensified, and he had to turn away, trembling, biting his lips against the harsher words that were threatening to spill out.

"Emmara is amazing." The sharp retort died on Ral's lips as he looked up at Jace's face. His friend's face had slid into an almost goofy grin.

"Guess you really like her," Ral said, instead. "Let's go back now. I'm fine." This was stupid. He was being stupid. Of course Jace had a girlfriend. Why wouldn't he? Jace was great. Any _girl_ would be lucky to get to date him.

"She's so cute and beautiful," Jace sighed as they headed back out toward the train station. "And delicate. Everything about her is just perfect." As soon as they came in sight of the two waiting girls, Jace practically ran across the station to attach himself to Emmara. Ral swallowed down the pain in his throat and clenched his fist against the prickling sensation in his hand. He was fine. Everything was fine.

* * *

Ral jerked to wakefulness, heart racing, clutching for his wand. There was a green flash still burned into the backs of his eyelids, and he had to stuff his face into the pillow to keep from crying out. _Just a dream_ , he told himself, but he was pretty sure that wasn't going to be enough.

It was rare for Ral to be the one to seek out Jace at night, but it was also fairly rare for Jace not to have already slipped into bed with him. It was weird and probably fucked up, but by now it was their normal. They'd been sharing a bed on and off, most nights, since they were eleven, after all. In fact, there had been several times over the summer when he'd fallen asleep face down on his laptop with the skype call still open. If things had gotten a little weirder a few years ago when Ral started waking up with stiffies, well, he just hadn't said anything about it. Besides, morning wood was just a normal part of puberty. Totally normal. So maybe he was a little gay. But he wasn't in love with his best friend. Not even a little bit.

He rolled out of bed. He wasn't going to be able to fall asleep without making sure that Jace was all right. Of course, there was no reason he wouldn't be. But Ral needed to see for himself. Jace wouldn't mind if he showed up instead of the other way around; it had happened on occasion.

The corridors were deathly still, though there were lights burning strongly at intermittent intervals. The nightlights had been put in place just before Ral's second year, when the rules had been rewritten to better accommodate for the insomnia and nightmares that so many of the recent students suffered from. As Ral headed upward, he passed Professor Granger hurrying down the corridor, and she gave him a slightly startled nod. She'd probably been expecting to see Jace. Ral hunched his shoulders against the worry and kept walking.

He opened the door of the Hufflepuff dormitory silently and snuck in. The sudden pitch darkness caught at his throat, and he almost dropped his wand as he scrabbled to get it out and cast _Lumos_. Of course it was dark. Jace hadn't brought Kallist back with him. And why hadn't he done that? It was totally out of character. Jace loved Kallist; he took him everywhere. He tried to feed him, for god's sake, and Kallist was a _cloud_.

At least Ral knew exactly where Jace's bed was. Third down from the door. Taking care not to trip over anyone else, he headed for it, and pulled back the curtain—only to feel as if he'd been punched in the gut. Jace was asleep, looking almost naked without his cloak, and his new girlfriend was curled up at his side, the hood of Jace's cloak drawn up over her head. She looked up, startled, then put a finger to her lips and gestured to Jace.

Letting the curtain fall, Ral backed away so fast he dropped his wand, and the light winked out as it dropped to the floor. His hand burst with pain so suddenly and sharply that he bent over with an anguished yelp, and then something white-hot and blazing snapped from the end of his hand toward the ground. The flash of lightning illuminated his wand for an instant before everything went dark again.

Ral's hand was still hot and stinging, and he swallowed against the rising pain in his throat. Of course Jace was sleeping in the same bed as Emmara—he was probably sleeping _with_ her, too. Angrily, Ral pressed the backs of both hands into his eyes until kaleidoscopic brown images wavered in front of them. Time to go back to bed. Jace was fine. Obviously. _Ral_ might not be fine, but who cared? Definitely not Jace.

* * *

Elspeth cracked her neck from side to side as she headed down the corridor. It was early in the morning, the sun barely peeking over the horizon. She liked the stillness of this time of day, the clear, new quality of the light, especially during the spring and fall. She paused for a moment at a window, running her finger along the sill and smiling out at the light swelling over the trees.

First stop: the owlery. Although it could get quite cold in the little room at times, today it was already warming up, the stones catching the early morning sunlight as Elspeth entered and looked around with a smile. She could use a proper morning flight soon, but she'd already promised herself she was going to go running first before she started practicing her Quidditch moves.

Achilles swooped down from near the top of the owlery, landing on her shoulder and nibbling at her ear. "Good morning." Elspeth sighed a little, as she undid the letter from beneath his wings. "Ral was in a terrible mood yesterday, and Jace was a little—preoccupied. I think it's going to be an annoying term," she told the owl, as she opened the envelope. The little niggling worry in the pit of her stomach was crowded out when, in addition to the usual letter scribbled in cramped but neat handwriting, a photograph dropped into her hand.

"I know you've been asking," her friend had written on the back, "and I hate how I look, but here you go." The girl in the photograph was staring intently at the camera, but she gave a tiny smile when Elspeth looked down at her, and Elspeth found herself grinning back, even though her pen pal couldn't see her. Though she knew her friend was only a year younger than she was, she was tiny. Even drawn up to as much of her full height as possible, she was clearly well under five feet, judging from the furniture in the background. She wore simple, dark robes with gold trim, and a funny jeweled headdress that came to a point in the center of her forehead.

Elspeth's stomach and heart flipflopped. She was small, but she was very elegant and very pretty. Elspeth thought she was probably wearing makeup, expertly applied. She sighed. She, herself, rarely bothered, and she certainly never did her hair up in anything fancier than a bun, usually just a straight plait. Well, never mind. No point wanting to be somebody she wasn't. It wasn't as if she was going to lose her friend for being a bit plain.

She stuffed the letter into her pocket. "Sorry, Achilles, I don't have a letter to send back yet, it's been rather crazy around here," she told the owl, which made a forgiving noise and fluttered back up into one of the higher alcoves. Elspeth turned and headed downstairs, the letter and photograph making a small, comfortable bulge inside her large pocket.

Limbering herself up in front of her usual side entrance, she straightened up when someone called her name. Ral looked pretty awful as he slouched into the hallway, dressed in Muggle running shorts and a grubby t-shirt with _ANARCHY_ scrawled across it in clumsy letters. There was a large hole in it just over his belly button, the edges of which had the particular stained, singed look that Elspeth had learned to recognize as generally being caused by chemical burns.

They sometimes did run together, but she wouldn't have expected him to be up for it the first day of term. She'd sort of expected him to want to spend more time with Jace, for one thing, although maybe Jace's new girlfriend was posing a problem in that regard. Elspeth chewed on her lip. "Are you feeling all right?" she asked hesitantly. Ral gave her a glare out of eyes marked by deep, dark circles.

"Of course," he snapped. "I just felt like exercising. Can't someone feel like exercising without getting the third degree?"

Elspeth's eyebrows went up. "Okay," she agreed. "Let's go, then." She didn't feel like having a conversation with him when he was in a mood this bad. Not even when she was flying high on the elation of getting a photo from her pen pal.

Ral took off running at about twice the pace that Elspeth would have chosen, and she considered letting him wear out by himself, but she wasn't sure she wanted to leave him alone right now, so she sighed and resigned herself to having a brief but intense workout. They sprinted around the side of the school, over a little stone bridge and into one of the larger gardens that the students sometimes tended for Herbology.

It was a large, round garden with a pebbly pathway that skirted the exterior, making it ideal for running laps. Ral started flagging as they hit the stones, and by the time they were halfway around the first circuit, he was panting and waving his arm to stop. Elspeth, despite being in better shape, was only too happy to catch her breath. "That was dumb," she said severely to him, as Ral doubled over his knees, gasping, and then threw up onto one of the rows of multicolored flowers at the edge of the path.

Despite being irritated, she went over to pat him on the back, but he waved her off. "I think Jace is under a spell," he said, when he'd finished emptying his breakfast onto the castle lawn.

Elspeth tapped her foot. "Is this because he has a girlfriend?" she asked. "I know this might seem odd to you, Ral, but people our age do sometimes fancy one another."

"No!" Ral protested, then sighed, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. "Yes. Kind of. She was sleeping in his bed last night!"

"You do that all the time."

"Yes, _exactly_. He didn't even fucking ask me, Elspeth!"

"People do dumb things when they're, well, you know. Jace is your friend, he's not your possession."

Ral glared at her. "What the fuck, Elspeth?" he demanded. "You think this is just because I'm jealous, don't you?"

She crossed her arms at him. "I think that's very likely, yes. And I know it feels bad, but you need to—"

Ral shook his head and cut her off. "No, I don't need to do anything. There's something wrong with him, Elspeth. He gave Emmara his cloak, she was wearing his cloak in bed, and he wasn't. He never takes that thing off."

"He probably wanted to do something stupid and romantic," Elspeth pointed out, and Ral made an angry, incoherent noise. "Ral…"

" _Fuck_!" Ral exploded, and this time there was a note of pleading confusion in his voice that made her want to hug him, but he took a step back as she took a step forward, one hand suddenly hidden behind his back. "Just—leave me alone," he snapped, waving a hand at her. "You don't get it. You just—"

She watched him jog unsteadily off deeper into the garden, sighed, and went back to her normal route. It was going to be frustratingly difficult to help him with this one. Jace might not be under a spell, but he was being annoyingly thoughtless.

* * *

Ral was not crying. If there were tears in his eyes, it was because the wind had picked up. He left the path and started pushing his way through row after row of vegetables. After he'd been running for several minutes, he felt a sharp pain in one leg, and suddenly he was falling. The breath he'd sucked in to gasp out an obscenity was knocked right back out of his lungs, and he looked down to see several of the plants he'd been stepping in twining angrily up his leg.

Oh, shit. Ral reached for his wand, but it was tangled in his shirt, and he couldn't get it out. Bright spots of blood appeared on his bare legs and he grunted in pain as the thorny vines tightened. His hand was heating up, just as it had a few minutes ago, and he still couldn't reach his wand inside the constricting folds of cloth.

The plants started to pull him backward, and Ral panicked, thrashing wildly. There was a loud noise, and he shouted as pain shot through his hand. A hissing noise came from the plants around him, and he felt spines digging into his waist and arms. He whimpered, trying to shield his face with his arms.

" _Exaresco!_ " A sudden blast of hot air slid over his shoulders and arms, and the constricting pain eased. He felt the vines go limp and begin to drop off. "Are you all right?" a new voice asked.

He lay and tried to take stock. His limbs were intact, and his stomach wasn't hurting anymore than it had been to begin with. "Yeah, I think so," he grunted.

" _Smilax_ _sernetai_ can be quite dangerous," the voice said, as a pair of hands helped Ral as he got slowly to his feet. "I'm afraid there's rather an infestation of them in the school gardens. I'm not sure why the gardeners let them get so out of hand this summer, but I will make sure to have words with them. Oh, dear, you're all scratched up. Hold still."

Awkardly, Ral stood still, staring at his rescuer. A few inches shorter than he was, the compact woman of indeterminate age was wearing what looked like Muggle jeans and a heavy leather jacket that seemed at odds with her loosely tied back ash blond hair. " _Episkey_ ," she said, waving her wand. Ral felt the stinging pain in his stomach and legs slowly ease as the healing spell took effect. "There. Is that better?"

He had to swallow several times before he was capable of nodding. "Yeah," he got out roughly. "Thanks."

The woman blinked large, pale blue eyes at him, and then broke into a sudden smile. "I'm Luna, by the way," she said.

"Ral," he answered automatically, putting out a hand for her to shake, wondering who she was. The name didn't give him much, and he couldn't even tell if she was the right age to be a student or a professor.

"I'm so happy to meet you," Luna said, sounding oddly sincere. "Do be careful around here if you're going to keep exercising."

"I guess I should get back," Ral mumbled. He was already worn out, and he didn't want to throw up again. "I should eat something before class," he added vaguely.

"I'm sure I'll see you again soon," Luna said, as he started to trudge back in the direction of the castle.

As he headed down the corridor toward the dining hall, he heard giggling, and he swung around to see Emmara and Jace, looking disheveled, stumbling into the corridor from behind one of the tapestries. There was a little hidden alcove behind that tapestry, Ral knew, and suddenly, the pain that had been hovering in the vicinity of his stomach reached up and clutched his throat. He turned around quickly, ignoring Jace's voice calling a greeting, and headed for the stairs. He was running by the time he reached the entrance to the Slytherin dungeon, and then he didn't actually go in. Instead, he sank down in front of the tapestry, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.

Oh, fuck it. He didn't think he cared enough to go to class today. Jace wasn't Jace anymore, and no one was going to believe him. The worst part, Ral thought miserably, was what if they were right? What if Jace just—didn't care about him anymore? No, Ral shook his head. Jace hadn't brought Kallist back with him. That wasn't like him. Something was definitely wrong.

Something _had_ to be wrong.


	4. Standing Stones

**Chapter Three: Standing Stones**

"Ready for a new year?" Harry asked Hermione, who looked up and smiled at him. They were unpacking a set of used books that a student who had graduated several years ago had sent over for the still relatively new Somnarium. After the year during which the first-years had formed their Sleep Club, Draco Malfoy had spearheaded an effort to create a large common room for all houses, where the students or professors could go if they had insomnia or nightmares. It had started as nothing more than a large room filled with beds and a carefully-tuned cauldron of Drowsiness Potion, and it had grown slowly over the past five years. Now, the walls had been enchanted with a spell that allowed any occupant to call up a desired scene, most of which were nature-based (Ral Zarek called it "screensaver mode", much to Harry and Hermione's amusement and Draco's bewilderment), and there were couches and large pillows in addition to beds.

They had recently begun fleshing out the library with donations from students and former students of books that people thought made soothing bedtime stories, and there was another new room being constructed that Hermione hoped to open soon, where she, Ral, and a few other of the Muggle-born students had been trying to figure out a way to even out the magical energies enough to allow a computer with internet access to be installed.

Hermione sat back on her heels and brushed her hair out of her face. "Getting there," she said. "Last year was a bit uneventful, though. I keep finding myself wondering if that's a good sign, or if something is going to happen again."

"Let's go with good sign," Harry replied, though he was honestly a little surprised that the previous year had been as uneventful as it had. They had a number of trouble-makers at the school right now, especially Jace Beleren and Ral Zarek. Maybe the fact that the two had been studying for their O.W.L.s had helped keep them out of the trouble they had managed to find themselves in every previous year.

Harry mentally went down the list: first year, nearly getting themselves killed by a boggart, though that hadn't been entirely their fault; second year, finding a hidden passage that had been disenchanted during the Wizarding War and using it to play hide-and-seek in until they woke up a very angry dragon; third year, forcing the school to be evacuated when their attempts to make a Bottled Dreams potion went very, very poorly; and fourth year, managing to get lost in Venice during the school trip and accidentally destroy a coven of vampires that had been terrorizing one of the smaller wizarding schools in the nation. These were, of course, all in addition to the sundry minor pranks and moments of really astonishing stupidity that had cropped up over the years.

Fifth year, though, not only had they both been studying for O.W.L.s, but Hermione had had the frankly brilliant idea of giving both of them individual research projects to work on—she had already been giving Ral private lessons for years, and it was mostly a matter of formalizing things and getting the resources for them. Several other students had also benefited from what turned into a new, individual projected-oriented class, but Harry definitely thought that the greatest benefit had been confining most of Ral's and Jace's overwhelming mental energy to a specific problem.

He glanced up at the clock to check the time. "I'd better get going, I'm supposed to meet Jace in five minutes," he said to Hermione. "We have a legilimency lesson." Despite Jace's unrivaled power as a legilimens, he still needed a teacher, and it had fallen to Harry, as the teacher with the most experience dealing with legilimency. Jace's talent was one of the things that Harry sometimes still found a little disconcerting. He knew what it was like to have a lot of power and not much control, but Jace was a very different person from Harry in many ways. No matter how much he tried, he thought he'd never really been able to mend his interactions with the boy since his first year. Jace was always polite but guarded around him, and, even if Harry had no one but himself to blame, it still stung. At least he and Draco seemed to get on well.

Hermione waved him off, and he headed out the door to his office, which he reached a minute or two late, and was getting ready to apologize when he realized Jace wasn't there yet, either. Harry ran a puzzled hand through his hair as he unlocked his office. Jace might be something of a troublemaker—a status that was probably exacerbated by his association with Ral Zarek—but he was also generally an overly conscientious, punctual student. It wasn't like him to be late.

When he heard a knock on his door ten minutes after the lesson was supposed to start, his mild concern vanished to be replaced with irritation, but he called out, "Come in!" as calmly as he could.

Jace breezed in the door with the hood of his cloak pushed back, his hair ruffled, and his robes askew. He was breathing hard, his cheeks flushed bright red. "Sorry I'm late, Professor," he said, not sounding sorry at all.

"Hm," Harry said, noncommittally. "Please don't be late again, Mr. Beleren. In the meantime, let's review what you were working on over the summer."

At the end of his fifth year, Jace's mental defenses had been strong, but clumsy. Harry was no longer able to brute force his way in, even using all his power and the methods he knew to increase his power. Jace had, however, still been susceptible to subtle assaults; he couldn't always tell when something was his own thought or someone else's, and that made it relatively easy to slide in through the cracks. His mental exercises over the summer had been tailored to work on that weakness. Harry intended to see how much progress he'd made.

" _Legilimens_ ," Harry said. Though he was capable of performing it wandlessly, he preferred to signal to Jace that the lesson was about to begin. He needed Jace to feel that he could trust him.

As was typical lately, Jace's mind felt like a smooth, blank wall beneath Harry's mental fingers. He felt carefully along it, feeling for the soft chinks, the little holes that the boy hadn't learned to close up at the end of his fifth year, and found one almost immediately. It was surprisingly large, actually, Harry thought he'd been getting better at closing up this kind of vulnerability. Nevertheless, he slipped inside—and was immediately assaulted with sensory input.

Hands on his shoulders, sliding down his waist, a pair of lips on his own. He heard his own voice loud in his ears, and for a moment, he didn't realize that it _wasn't_ his. Harry pulled back right away, feeling his ears flush with embarrassment as he realized both why Jace had been late and what kind of memory he had stumbled into accidentally.

He sat still for a minute to recover himself, trying to make the twin awkward feelings of arousal and serious discomfort go down. That had _not_ been something he'd wanted to see or think about, much less experience. He would have to be more careful in future, especially if Jace was likely to be having any more snogging sessions. Harry supposed he was sixteen, after all, so it probably shouldn't be all that surprising.

"Professor? Is something wrong?" Jace's voice sounded almost smug, and Harry looked up sharply. There was a faint smile hovering at the corner of his student's lips, almost a smirk, and he suddenly realized that the effect of accidentally—as he'd thought—invading the boy's privacy had been to cause him to reflexively pull back entirely.

"Did you do that on purpose, Jace?" he asked.

"Well," Jace grinned, looking very pleased with himself, "you said at the end of last semester that I needed to stop letting people trick their way into my head."

"Did it occur to you that—" Harry paused, trying to choose his words carefully. " _Don't_ do that again," he said. "I want to make this very clear. That was seriously inappropriate."

"I figured it would work," Jace shrugged. "It would keep most people out. Or distract them, I guess." He smirked again.

"If I catch you deliberately showing me memories like that again, you will have detention for a week," Harry said. "The idea is good, I can't fault that, but if you're going to be practicing with me, you need to come up with something else."

"Sorry," Jace said, sounding slightly chastened, but still more pleased with himself than Harry would have liked. He sighed mentally. Horny teenagers were almost impossible to deal with, and Jace really was very talented, which made the whole situation worse. Time to have a long discussion with Draco again. Somehow, he always ended up feeling better after talking to his friend, even when it didn't manage to resolve anything. And, of course, Draco had a much better handle on how to interact with Jace. Harry grimaced slightly. It was going to be a long year.

* * *

Hermione sighed with satisfaction as she sank into one of the Hogwarts library chairs. In the hustle and bustle of the beginning of term, it had been almost a week since she'd had a chance to sit down and just relax with a good book. So far, the year was going reasonably smoothly, although, she thought cynically, that it probably wasn't going to last. She had also drafted three different letters to Ron, all of which she had set on fire after penning one or two sentences. She kept wanting to ask Harry for help, but she didn't really know how to explain her feelings in a way that wouldn't make him think she wanted to get back together with Ron—and she certainly did not want that.

A sudden shriek dragged her out of her thoughts. Somebody unauthorized was trying to take one of the books out of the Restricted Section. Of course, Hermione thought, as she put her book down and hurried off toward it at a half-jog. She couldn't even get five minutes of peace around here.

She rounded the corner to find, to her surprise, a somewhat flustered-looking Luna Lovegood shouting at a book. The book was screaming back, and it was louder than Luna, so Hermione had no idea what her friend was saying. She whipped her wand out and shouted, " _Silencio liber_!"

The book went quiet immediately, and somewhat apologetically flipped itself closed.

"—you stupid volume! Oh." Luna turned to Hermione and gave her a smile. "Thank you. It seems the books don't recognize me yet."

"I expect someone forgot to cast the proper spell on you at the beginning of term," Hermione said apologetically. "Actually, I'm not sure who was supposed to do it. It's been a while since we've had a new addition to the faculty."

"It's fine," Luna said vaguely. "I was afraid the books didn't like me, but if we simply need to be properly introduced, that's no trouble." She smiled at Hermione, who smiled back, not quite sure if she ought to laugh or not. She couldn't always tell when Luna was joking.

"Right," she said, after a moment of awkward silence. "Well, I can do that for you now, if you'd like."

"Yes, please." Luna nodded, and Hermione raised her wand.

The incantation was a little more complex than she might normally have volunteered to do without preparation, especially since she hadn't performed it herself since Harry began working at Hogwarts five years ago. But something about Luna's calm gaze made her want to try. Luna wanted to meet the books, and she clearly fully believed in Hermione's ability to make that happen.

So Hermione took Luna's hand gently, traced the complicated sigil on the back of it with her wand, and murmured in Latin, " _By the power vested in me as Professor of Hogwarts, I bestow the rights of ownership upon Luna Lovegood._ There," she finished, as she felt the soft hum of acceptance from the library around her. "You should be recognized now."

Luna blinked at her, and her lips twitched just slightly further upward. "But you haven't introduced me yet," she said. Hermione stared at her, unable to tell if she was serious or joking.

"Well—er—" she replied after a moment. "All right." She squinted at the book. "Um, _Darkest Myths of Ancient Britain_ , this is Luna, er, Lovegood. Luna, this is… _Darkest Myths of Ancient Britain_?"

"Pleased to meet you." Luna stroked a gentle hand across the front cover and opened the book. Hermione found herself oddly captivated with the movement of her friend's hands, and she had to shake her head and look away. "I'm afraid, though, that you aren't the book I was looking for."

Shaking her head slightly, she slid it carefully back on the shelf.

"What book are you looking for?" Hermione asked.

"I'm…not entirely sure." Luna shuffled her feet and stared pensively to one side. "It was quite a large book, I remember that. I think there was golden script along the spine, and it was bound in either black or very dark blue leather. And for some reason, it makes me think of boats…"

"How can you not be sure?" Hermione asked practically. "Why were you looking for it, then?"

"It was a book we used for the DA, a long time ago. And when I saw the stones, I thought perhaps they were the stones it had mentioned."

"Stones?"

"They were broken, and it felt—" Luna cut herself off abruptly, shivering. "Sorry," she said. "I don't think I'm telling this story the right way round."

"Are you all right?" Hermione asked. Her friend was pale and shivering, and when Hermione looked closer, she saw that Luna had marked circles beneath her large eyes. Her forehead was damp. "Do you have a fever?" She automatically reached out to feel Luna's forehead, but the other woman ducked backwards with a small smile.

"Oh! No, I'm all right," Luna replied. "I've just been feeling a bit under the weather."

"Why don't you come back to my study and tell the story the right way round, then? I could make you some herbal tea."

Luna smiled suddenly, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. "I'd like that," she said.

The tea seemed to help with the shivering, at any rate, though Luna still looked pale and quite thin with her long fingers clasped around Hermione's favorite china mug. Luna chewed on the corner of her mouth a little before she started to talk again. "I don't know how much you know about what I've been doing," she started, eventually.

"You were doing a lot of traveling, I know that." Hermione poured herself a cup of tea as well. "I couldn't figure out where to send letters to you. I actually feel pretty bad about that."

"Oh." Luna traced a finger around the rim of her cup. "I—didn't realize you wanted to send me letters. I'm sorry."

Frowning, Hermione took a sip of her tea. It was too hot, and she hissed in pain as she burned her tongue. "You're a really good friend," she said fiercely. "Of course I want to know what's going on with you. I want—" She wasn't sure if she could explain everything she wanted. A small voice at the back of her mind piped up, _Are you sure you know what you want?_

Luna nodded. "I did do a lot of traveling. I ended up in some pretty strange places—I have some photos I can show you later. But there was one place…well, I thought I might be on the trail of the Crumple-horned Snorkack finally, and I accidentally stumbled on a place in the northern part of Wales. It was—" she shivered again, pressing her hands more tightly around the teacup. "It was very dark. You could tell. There had been something buried in the earth there—there were still the remnants of a powerful spell and a befuddlement charm of some kind, which I imagine is why it had been undisturbed for so long. And I tried telling the Ministry about it, but they didn't really seem to want to know. I guess they didn't want to have something else to deal with so soon after the war."

Hermione nodded, quashing a sudden instinct to reach out and take Luna's hand. "What about the book?" she prompted.

"Oh, yes." Luna smiled dreamily and sighed. "I got lost out there. It was a bit frightening, really. Some kind of charm I'd never dealt with kept making me come back to the open casket."

"Casket?" Hermione echoed.

Luna nodded. "Oh, yes, there were bits and pieces of stone, and I'm fairly sure that's what it was. _Do not awaken_ , said one of the bits."

Despite herself, despite the coziness of the firelit study, Hermione found herself shivering as well. It was a horribly eerie story.

"It made me think of a book I'd read, quite a long time ago. There were pictures in it of a casket in a fairy ring that said something in Welsh on it. The trouble is, I can't remember what the book was called. I just know it was here. So, well, I'm afraid that's one of the two major reasons I decided to come back and help out at Hogwarts."  
"What was the other reason? You really missed the delicious Hogwarts food?" Hermione tried to joke, but it fell a little flat when Luna put her head on one side with a considering look.

"I don't think I'll tell you the other reason _just_ yet," she said, with a small smile. "Maybe later."

"Well," Hermione said, trying to reign in her curiosity, "anyways, that does sound serious. Can I help you look? In between classes and preparation time and research, I mean."

"Yes, please," Luna smiled. "It—it _might_ be nothing. I hope it is."

The chilly atmosphere that had been growing in the room seemed to subside, and this time, Hermione couldn't quite stop herself from reaching out and brushing her fingers across the back of Luna's hand.


	5. Elemental Resonance

**Chapter Four: Elemental Resonance**

The work-table was covered in bits and pieces. Ral stared at them a little sullenly. Somewhere inside his head was a picture of what they should look like when they were put together, but right now it seemed fuzzy and indistinct. His brain didn't seem to want to work properly anymore, and finally he put his forehead down on the table with a clunk. "God _dam_ mit."

"Are you having difficulty, Mr. Zarek?"

Professor Granger looked up from the potion she had been bending over, and Ral almost wished he hadn't bothered coming to his independent study today. He'd have gotten in trouble, but it might have been easier to deal with.

"No," he gritted out. Then he reached out a finger and poked at one of the bits. They were supposed to be coming together into a vaguely glove-like shape, but they just looked like little twists of metal and wood. Ral tried to recapture the desire he'd had when he'd pitched this independent study, the idea of a magical battery that would siphon energy and transmute it into electricity—basically a kind of magical transformer. The idea still tugged at him, but the feeling was muted and indistinct. All he seemed to be able to think about properly was the look on Jace's face as he gazed at Emmara, like she was the most precious thing he'd ever seen in his life. And thinking about that hurt.

Ral's stomach felt pinched and sore, and his right hand was heating up again. A tiny spark skipped from one finger over to a coil of wire on the table, and he froze. This was the _last_ thing he needed, this stupid fucking— _lightning_. _Stop it_ , Ral told himself, but the heat in his hand intensified as he focused on it.

"Mr. Zarek?" Professor Granger said again.

"I'm fine, leave me alone," Ral managed, but he knew he sounded more scared than angry at this point. There was a scraping noise as Professor Granger pushed back her chair and stood up. "I'm fine," he said again, and at least the heat in his hand seemed to lessen, but he didn't have long to be grateful for that before two tears squeezed their way out of his eyes and fell on the work-table.

"Is this something that I can help with?" Professor Granger asked gently, and Ral felt one wild moment of surging hope.

"It's Jace," he stammered out. "There's—something wrong, I think. He's been acting weird since the beginning of the year."

"Weird how?"

"He and Emmara—" Ral swallowed, swiped the back of his hand across his eyes, and managed to look up at Professor Granger. That was a mistake. He could see the moment that her brow furrowed between her eyes, and he knew what she was going to say. He knew she was going to say he was jealous, just like everybody else. "I'm not jealous!" he snarled. Heat in his hand, surging up his spine. "It's not that—I'm not even that _gay_!" Oh, fuck. He hadn't meant to say that. "He's under a spell, he didn't bring Kallist back with him, he…"

Even as he said it, he knew how she was going to respond. Just like everyone else, and the heat surged sudden and white and blazing, from the top of his head down the side of his arm. There was a bang that he was intimately familiar with, but it usually accompanied a purposeful spell, and lightning bolted out from the end of his hand, crackling across the face of the lab table and jumping erratically from object to object. Ral took a deep, shuddering breath. His arm was aching, a sudden, bone-deep ache that met the pinching feeling in his stomach with an unpleasant twist. Was there actually something wrong with him? Was this what Jace had felt like in first-year? "I've gotta go," he blurted, shoving himself back from the lab table as if it was a hot stove.

"Mr. Zarek—"

"I know, detention, sorry," Ral said as he reached the door. "I won't do it again. I'll make up today's work later. I can't focus."

If Professor Granger was drawing breath to say something else, he wasn't going to wait around to hear it. Ears burning, he pelted out of the study, and it wasn't until he was halfway down the stairs that he realized he didn't really have anywhere to go. He sat down on the middle step and put his head in his hands.

After a few minutes, he heard quiet footsteps behind him. "I'm not going to give you detention," Professor Granger said. "But I am worried about you, Ral. Quite honestly, you've always had trouble controlling your temper, and I don't want to see that get worse."

"Yeah," Ral muttered. "Sorry. Just a bad day."

"Do you want to actually talk about it?" He raised and lowered one shoulder. Professor Granger sighed. "I know you know that kind of behavior is unacceptable."

 _But I didn't mean to_ , Ral wanted to protest. He swallowed it, because it was a stupid, useless kind of thing to say. Instead, he just made a soft, assenting noise.

"Why don't you go back to your dorm for the time being?" Professor Granger suggested. "We can talk about it when you're feeling better."

 _How about never?_ Oh, god, he'd basically outed himself to a teacher in the Wizarding World. Ral knew his parents wouldn't give a fuck if he was gay, but the Muggle world was a lot more accepting about certain things, as far as he could tell. What if he got expelled for being gay? What if— _shut up_ , he told his brain fiercely. He'd been babbling. She probably hadn't even heard him. Besides, what was important was that Jace was under a fucking _spell_ , and no one was going to believe him, because they all thought he was fucking _jealous_.

"Sure," he said, taking a deep breath. "Yeah. I'll go lie down. Maybe I caught the bug that's going around the girls' dorm."

"Maybe," Professor Granger said. "Well, Ral, I'll see you later."

"See you." His arm was still aching.

* * *

Chandra flung herself down onto Elspeth's bed with a yawn. "I'm so tired," she announced. "I just want to sleep for a week."

Elspeth patted her arm. "You'll have to wait for the holidays like everybody else."

"It's this stupid bug," Chandra complained. "And of course I'm the only Gryffindor to have come down with it so far."

"So is Gideon expected to catch it soon then?" Tamiyo put in archly from across the room. Everyone knew he fancied Chandra, but no one was quite sure if Chandra reciprocated or not.

Chandra glared across the room, grabbed Elspeth's pillow, and flung it angrily. Her aim was off, and it bounced gently against Emmara's head. The French girl looked up with a gasp from the book she had been reading, then laughed.

"Sorry!" Chandra called. "Wasn't aiming for you."

Sitting up, Emmara sent the pillow whizzing back across the room, almost knocking Chandra off the bed. "Got you back anyway," she said with a grin. Elspeth still didn't really know what to think of her. She tended to be rather quiet and private—and she spent a lot of time with Jace.

Elspeth was trying very hard to judge Emmara for her own qualities and not fall into the trap of disliking her because she took Jace's time away from Elspeth and Ral. It wouldn't be fair to Emmara if both of them gave her the cold shoulder, and it was obvious that Ral wasn't going to be objective. Elspeth was sympathetic, she was just also—tired. She wished she could talk to Jace or Ral about this, but Ral was definitely not going to be much use right now.

"Say, Emmara," Chandra said lazily. "What was it like, being Sorted as a sixth year?"

Emmara shrugged. "Probably the same as it would have been as a first-year, I suppose."

"Couldn't you have asked them to Sort you not at the ceremony?" Nissa put in. "It must have felt very odd, being the only one who wasn't a child."

"I suppose." Emmara leaned back over a sheet of paper that was probably her homework. "I didn't think it was necessary to bother." She paused, tilting her head to one side. "It was quite fun."

"Did they have anything like it at your old school?" Elspeth asked, trying to get herself interested in the conversation. She probably ought to be doing her homework, but she felt almost as tired as Chandra looked.

"Not really." Emmara looked up again, favoring Elspeth with a tight, slightly nervous smile. "You're one of Jace's friends, aren't you, Elspeth? I mean, one of his close friends?"

Was she jealous? Elspeth nodded. "Yeah," she said awkwardly. "We've known each other for a while."

"I only met him a few months ago, but I like him so much." Elspeth wasn't sure what her tone of voice signified. Something about the way she spoke seemed a little unusual, but it was probably the accent. Maybe just the fact that English presumably wasn't her first language. "I just wondered if you have any advice."

"Advice?" Elspeth echoed in confusion.

"Things he likes for presents, that sort of thing…"

Chandra snorted something into Elspeth's pillow. "What did you say?" Emmara asked, and Chandra looked up with a shrug.

"I said, I still can't believe he's straight."

Emmara's eyebrows went up, and Elspeth shifted uncomfortably. This was not a conversation she wanted to be having right now. Or ever, preferably. Emmara shrugged and didn't seem as if she was going to answer, which meant Elspeth was at least off the hook for now. Then Chandra spoke again, "So, are you positive, Emmara?"

"Positive of what?"

"Chandra," Elspeth said, "shut up."

"That's he's straight."

"I don't think that is any of your business," Emmara said mildly, turning back to her book. "If I am happy, and he is happy, that is all that matters, no?"

"No," Chandra said loudly, and Elspeth put a hand on her shoulder.

"Don't," she said, quietly. "Emmara hasn't done anything."

"Well, _Jace_ has!" snapped Chandra. "He went and broke Ral's heart, and you know it!"

The room went suddenly quiet, and Elspeth tried to figure out what the right thing to say was. Finally, she settled for, "They weren't dating, you know."

Chandra gave her a look. "They weren't dating _anyone_ ," she said pointedly. "You know they were going to be a thing. Everybody knew they were going to be a thing."

On the other bed, Emmara shrugged. "Jace didn't seem to think so," she said. "If Ral never said anything, that's his loss."

As Chandra started to get up, Elspeth put a hand on her arm. "Come on, Chandra," she said. "We're all worried about Ral, but Emmara's right. And it's definitely not _her_ fault. Ral will—" she swallowed, thinking about his face the last time she'd seen it, "—he'll be fine after a little while."

Chandra flung herself back down on the bed with a wordless noise and muttered something into the pillow, but Elspeth decided not to probe what it was. Her friend could be very rude when she wanted to be. She sighed. It was definitely not going to be an easy semester, and she was so tired she didn't even want to look at her homework yet.

* * *

Jace was worried about Ral. For some reason, ever since the encounter in the bathroom at the Hogwarts Express, he'd barely seen him. Ral seemed to be slipping in late to class and then was always the first one out, so he never managed to catch him then. And, Jace thought a little guiltily, he had been sharing his bed with Emmara at night, and he hadn't been able to explain himself to Ral.

Not that he needed to, of course. They didn't have an _agreement_ or anything, but it was just that it was something they had done a lot up until this year, and maybe it was kind of a dick move to stop doing it without even letting Ral know about it. But, Jace thought, when would he have had the chance, anyway? He sighed.

"Are you all right, Jace?" Emmara asked from beside him, and he nodded.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"You seem distracted."

"Mmm, I guess I am, a little." Shaking his head, he tried to focus on the Quidditch game, instead. It was Elspeth's first year as captain, so it was very important that he cheer her on. Of course, the fact that this was a Hufflepuff versus Slytherin match just made everything more awkward.

In the air above them, Elspeth executed a flawless turn, snatched the Quaffle out of a surprised Seeker's hands—a fifth-year Slytherin named Vraska—and sent it spinning through the goal hoops. Jace got to his feet, cheering so hard that he actually started to cough.

"Here, have a drink," Emmara said, her voice amused, as she pushed the flask she always carried into his hands.

"Thanks," Jace said. The water was especially sweet on his tongue today, and he sighed as he sat back down, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and passing it back to her. She was so beautiful that he had to pause for a minute, feeling somewhat small and grubby beside her pale-skinned loveliness. "Um," he said. "Can I kiss you?"

Emmara smiled sweetly. "Of course." She fluffed her ash-blond hair and leaned forward.

* * *

"Ugh!" Hermione flung herself down into the squashiest armchair in the teachers' lounge. She must be in an especially bad mood, Draco mused, since she generally preferred to perch on the side of one of the harder chairs, certainly not sink down into the squashy chair as if she were trying to keep going through the floor.

"Everything all right?" he asked her, putting down the book he had been reading.

"The sixth-years are impossible, I'm worried about Luna, and I just got a letter from Ron, so no. Nothing is all right," Hermione complained.

"I suppose the last uneventful semester couldn't last," Draco said thoughtfully. "Is Mr. Zarek causing you trouble?"

"Concern, really, to be fair," Hermione answered. "He almost seems as if he's losing control of his magic."

"More than usual, you mean?"

"I don't mean his tendency to fly off the handle. I mean he cast a lightning spell yesterday without his wand, and I don't think he meant to."

"Hm," Draco said. "Well, Mr. Zarek certainly does have a way with lightning. Are you sure he didn't mean to?"

"I'm not quite certain, no, but it did seem like it." She sighed. "I suppose I can just keep an eye on him for now. He seems to be awfully worried about Jace as well."

"Jace is giving Harry a headache, but I think it's just normal teenage hormones." Draco shifted in his seat. "What's this about Ron sending you a letter?"

Flinging her arms over the leg of the chair, which was even more unusual for her, Hermione dug in the pocket of her robe and pulled out a piece of parchment. "Here," she said stiffly, then cleared her throat. " 'Dear Hermione,'" she began, then wilted. "Oh, I can't. It's not—there's nothing wrong with it, it's a perfectly reasonable letter, I just don't know how to talk to him!"

"Well, I'm sure you're aware he's not my favorite person," Draco drawled. He had never had any great love for the youngest Weasley boy, although he had tried to temper his initial dislike after the war. The incident between Hermione and Ron had not improved matters, however, and he had given up on trying after finding Hermione crying in an alcove one too many times.

"Yes, and I think that's completely reasonable." Hermione briskly flicked a loose strand of hair out of her eyes. "I just…we _were_ such good friends. He knows he behaved—well—awfully. I want to forgive him. I just don't know how. I don't want him to think I have any desire whatsoever to get back together with him."

"Well, have you?" Draco drawled. She had oscillated quite a bit in the time after the breakup, muttering about 'poor Ron' and 'such good times originally', though, as far as he knew, the Weasley brat didn't know about any of that.

"No." Hermione spoke with a level of firmness Draco had rarely heard her apply to this particular topic. "No, I very much do not."

Something about her voice made him look up. A faint pink tinged the top of her ears and splashed across her cheeks. "Is there someone else?" he asked, with a faintly predatory grin.

"No—I mean—I don't—" Hermione floundered helplessly. "That is, I—" She paused. "Oh dear," she said, at last. "Er, well, I suppose there might be. But I don't think that—" very long pause indeed, "—I don't think that the person is likely to feel the same way about me, and I hadn't even, well, really realized that until you asked just now."

Draco shrugged. "Well, you won't know unless you ask," he said pragmatically, but before he could try to probe any further, the door slammed open and Harry stalked in. Brows drawn down and his robes swirling around him, he almost seemed to draw the colors out of the rest of the room. Draco found himself having to take a deep breath, and then wondered where that had come from.

"Good…evening, Harry?" Hermione ventured tentatively.

"Merlin's _fucking_ beard," Harry said, starting toward the squashy armchair and pausing when he saw it was already occupied. Draco had to hide a smile. Apparently everyone's response to a bad day was throwing themselves down into that particular armchair. He had to admit, he'd been guilty of it himself before.

Thwarted, Harry shoved his hands in the pockets of his robes and began to pace. "The sixth-years are bloody impossible this year," he groaned. "After last year, I really thought we were going to have a little peace with that crowd."

"What happened this time?" Draco asked mildly.

"Ral skipped DADA this morning, and when I went to find him later, I caught him laying lightning traps around our new transfer student's bed. How he got into the Hufflepuff girls' dormitory, I don't know."

"Oh, Merlin," Hermione groaned. "What kind of traps?"

"I don't think they would have hurt her much," Harry said, slowly. "Certainly, I think he just wanted to make her uncomfortable. But when I caught him, he tried to shock me as well."

Draco frowned. "Did he realize it was you?" he asked.

"I don't know." Harry shrugged. "I think it was an automatic reaction, but it's still—concerning. Without more control, he could seriously injure someone with a spell like that."

"What did you do?" Hermione asked, but before Harry could answer, the door opened yet again, and Luna Lovegood entered the room, twirling her hair absently with one hand.

"I don't think you should assume he was trying," she said mildly. Draco, Harry, and Hermione paused and blinked at her in confusion. "Oh," her mild-eyed stare slid around the room, pausing on the squashy armchair just as everyone else's had, "I just overheard the last bit of the conversation. And I was just wondering if Ral might be an elementalist."

"A what?" Harry asked.

"Well, they're more common in Eastern Europe and Russia, I believe," Luna said calmly. "Probably the school system in Britain is too rigid for them, or maybe there's something about the heredity. But Ral's family are immigrants, aren't they?"

"Yes," Hermione supplied, sounding as confused as Draco.

"Well, then." Luna nodded to herself. "He's probably got an affinity for lightning, I imagine. Elementalists sometimes have more trouble with control than more generalist wizards do." She cocked her head to one side. "You might keep an eye on Chandra, as well. She does seem to set her plants on fire quite a lot, and she's half Indian, you know. It's also more common in India, I think, though I haven't spent much time there."

"Merlin," Draco groaned. "You mean half of the sixth years are _natively_ bad at controlling their magic?"

"Actually it's only about seven and a half percent." Luna smiled, and Hermione choked out a surprised laugh. "I suppose that's higher than the usual, though."

"I gave him a detention," Harry said, with a sigh.

"Why don't I take it?" Luna suggestly brightly. "I'll give him some books about elementalism to read. I'm sure he'd like that. He's always got good questions. Very curious boy. I like him."

"Yeah, please," Harry said. "Jace has been racking up detentions as well, and he shouldn't be. He's a sixth-year, they're supposed to be a bit more responsible."

"You mean like we were?" Draco said, with a wicked grin. "Wasn't sixth-year the year you were sneaking around with an ex-Death-Eater's potion book?"

"Shut up." Harry's voice was harsh, but he laughed. "All right, so maybe I'm expecting a little much, but Merlin's beard. I've got so much sympathy for all our professors now."

Luna perched herself on the arm of the squashy armchair, a little hesitantly. "You don't mind?" she asked Hermione, who stared for a moment, then shook her head.

Draco glanced from one of them to the other. Hm. "Does anyone want to watch a movie?" he asked. "I think we've all had as much of the students as we can take, and since Mr. Zarek was kind enough to get a TV working for us, we might as well use it."

"Excuse me," Hermione said. "I did most of the work on that."

Draco just grinned at her and winked, and she blew out her cheeks and huffed at him, but the expression turned into a smile.

* * *

Elspeth gnawed on her lip and stared down at the parchment on her bed, clicking and unclicking the ball-point pen she'd brought back from summer at the Zareks'. It was so much more practical than a quill. For what had to be the umpteenth time, she looked up at the little photograph she had pinned over her bed. Her pen-pal gave her a small smile and a tiny wave, and her stomach turned over.

Groaning, she ground her face into her pillow. When she'd been at Ral's house, it hadn't seemed so strange, but now that she was back at Hogwarts, it was very odd to be imagining kissing another girl. Especially now that she had actually seen a picture of said girl, because the image seemed to have got stuck in her head; she kept coming back to it at horribly inopportune times. It wasn't _that_ odd, surely? Ral's parents had even asked if she had a girlfriend or a boyfriend at one point. But before then, it hadn't really occurred to her. She'd barely even realized that it was a _thing_.

She sighed. She was never going to be able to write the next letter if she couldn't settle her nerves a bit. Maybe if she went to talk to Chandra about it—Chandra's family was split between Indian wizards and British Muggles, so she'd presumably have a different perspective, and, in any case, she was one of Elspeth's closest friends. Elspeth might have gone to Ral or Jace first, but Ral was basically refusing to talk and also far too stressed, and she couldn't seem to catch Jace at a time when his mouth wasn't occupied with Emmara's. Which really was getting to be a bit much, she thought. At least he could stop doing it where Ral could see him. He _had_ to know, didn't he? Well, maybe not. Jace had never been very perceptive.

Anyways, time to find Chandra. She got out of bed and sucked in a sudden, nauseated breath. Colored dots swirled in front of her eyes, and the next moment she was leaning against the wall, pain sparking through her hand where she'd fallen against it. She blinked a few times to clear her vision and shook her head. This stupid virus was really starting to cause problems. Maybe she should go to Madam Pomfrey, but the Quidditch match against Gryffindor was coming up in a few days, and that was the last important one for a while. If she could just make it a few more days, then she could go to the Hospital Wing guilt free.

She waited another minute or two for her head to stop spinning, and then she set off for Gryffindor. Chandra was usually in the common room at this time of day if she wasn't doing her homework with the rest of her friends in the Hufflepuff dorm, but it was quite a lazy, sleepy late afternoon, so perhaps she'd fallen asleep.

Elspeth was breathing annoyingly hard by the time she had checked the Gryffindor common room and found no one and was heading up to the girls' dorm. This stupid fatigue. She just needed to get better already. When she entered the room, she had to pause again to lean against the wall, but when her head stopped spinning, she was able to hear low voices and giggling coming from Chandra's bed.

Pausing for a moment, Elspeth considered. Maybe she should wait. But both voices were female, so she wasn't likely to catch Chandra doing anything too embarrassing, and most of Chandra's close friends were hers as well, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem to pull Chandra away for a minute to ask for her advice. She bounced nervously on the balls of her feet for a minute before heading over to Chandra's bed and pulling back the curtains around it.

"Um, Chandra, can I talk to you for a mi—"

Elspeth felt her jaw literally drop as she stared. Chandra was on her bed, her robes carelessly piled in a heap on the floor, shirt half-unbuttoned, tie flung sideways across one shoulder. Her knees were on either side of Nissa's waist, and Nissa herself was wearing absolutely nothing on her top half. The two looked up, and Nissa froze as Elspeth spoke. Chandra went slightly pink. "Now isn't actually, um…can it wait?" she asked, as Nissa frantically reached behind herself and grabbed a pillow to cover her chest.

"I'm so sorry!" Elspeth squeaked, her voice going high and scratchy.

"If it's really important, I can—" Chandra cleared her throat. "I mean, um…"

"No! I think you just answered my question!" Elspeth babbled. "It's fine, I'll tell you later, everything's fine, I'm sorry, please just go back to what you were doing." She backed away, letting the curtain fall back into place. As she hurried out of the room, she heard Chandra and Nissa starting to giggle nervously.

She leaned against the wall outside again. Well, she thought, rather shamefacedly, that had been incredibly stupid, but she supposed she had an answer to her question. Thinking 'it won't be embarrassing because there isn't a boy in there' when she was literally coming to ask Chandra about the feasibility of having a crush on a girl had been pretty silly. But at least now she knew for sure that Chandra wouldn't find it odd. And neither would Nissa, presumably. And maybe that was all she needed. She blushed slightly again at the glimpse she'd gotten of Nissa's breasts, and found herself wondering a little guiltily what her pen pal would look like if she slid the robes off her shoulders and—

Time for a cold shower. Then she could go back to trying to finish this letter.


	6. Sick and Tired

**Chapter Five: Sick and Tired**

Nothing was going right. Ral stared moodily at the players circling the Quidditch field on brooms and tried not to let his attention be drawn three rows back and two seats to the left, where Emmara was practically climbing into Jace's gauntlet still wasn't doing anything. Well, it spit colored sparks when someone cast a spell near it, but that was it. This was officially the worst school year Ral had had in his life. He knew he needed to start paying attention to his schoolwork again, or he was going to be in a lot of trouble, what with N.E.W.T.s on the horizon, but he couldn't seem to focus lately. Hell, he could barely get himself to eat.

With a sigh, he stared up at Elspeth, who was circling around the outside of the field on her broom. Something about that seemed odd to him. Shouldn't she be chasing the Quaffle? But it was being tossed back and forth almost at the other end of the field now. Ral saw one of her teammates tilt her broom back toward Elspeth, saw a hand waved in a frustrated gesture. Elspeth's broom waggled in the air as she turned it again, and Ral felt uneasiness roiling up in his stomach. He'd watched her play Quidditch before, and her motions tended to be strong and purposeful, but now she was almost wobbling, and though she seemed to be trying to turn in the direction of the Quaffle, the nose of her broom was wavering. It was almost as if she was losing her grip and going to—

The broom veered sharply to the right as Elspeth slipped off. Ral was on his feet before he knew what he was doing, wand in hand. "Wingardium leviosa!" he screamed, over the roar of the crowd, half of whom hadn't even noticed. Heat shot through one hand and a shower of sparks burst from the base of his wand, but Elspeth's tumble jerked to a stop abruptly, as she hung, head lolling, from the robes that Ral had caught with the levitation charm.

A long moment passed before anyone seemed to realize what had happened, a moment that Ral used to control the trembling in his limbs, to force the sparks to dissipate, and to slowly, gently bring Elspeth to the ground. Then the crowd went silent, a whistle blew, and Ral found himself halfway across the field along with Professors Granger and Potter, kneeling beside Elspeth's crumpled form. Her face was horrifyingly white and pale, and for an instant, he thought she wasn't breathing, but then she blinked her eyes and opened them.

"Merlin," she murmured. "What happened?" She made a movement as if she were trying to sit up, and Professor Potter put out a hand to stop her, but before he could, she moaned and sank back down. "I'm so dizzy."

"Let's get her to the hospital wing," Professor Potter said.

"She doesn't have any broken bones," agreed Professor Granger. "I don't know what's wrong." Ral hadn't even noticed the tip of her wand glowing, or heard any kind of muttered incantation. He was too busy trying to control the heat building in his right hand again. Just a few more deep breaths should do it.

Professor Potter carefully picked Elspeth up, waving Ral back as he did so. "I've got her," he said, and Ral found himself trailing miserably after the two of them as they began to make their way off the Quidditch pitch. A sick glance back told him that Jace was finally standing up and looking in their direction, but his hand was still tightly entwined with Emmara's, and his hair was sticking up every which way. A sudden, tight ball in the pit of Ral's stomach accompanied a brief vision of Jace sitting in his lap, looking at _him_ like that. No. He wasn't jealous. Jace should have been the first person to notice that Elspeth was flying erratically. He was usually the most observant of the three of them. It _had_ to be a spell of some kind.

Ral followed the two professors carrying Elspeth right down to the hospital wing, until Professor Granger turned and told him, "I'm sorry, Ral, you'll need to wait outside."

Elspeth managed to look up and give him a small smile. "I'm okay," she murmured. "Just a virus. Sorry to worry you."

Sinking miserably back against the wall, Ral watched as the door to the hospital wing closed behind them. Professor Potter came out a moment later. "I'm sure she'll be fine," he said. "I'm sorry, Ral, I'd better get back to the pitch and figure out whether the game is going to finish or not."

Jace arrived minutes after Professor Potter had left, actually alone, for once.

"How's Elspeth?" he asked Ral breathlessly.

"I don't know." Ral stared at the door to the hospital wing, feeling abruptly unmoored and awkward. This was one of the first times Jace had spoken directly to him this year. Was he really under a spell? Or was Elspeth right; was Ral just desperately jealous? If he _was_ under a spell, then Ral shouldn't be angry with _Jace_ , should he? And yet he was, a hot, hurt, frustrated feeling that rose inside his chest and choked him until he could barely speak.

"What happened?" Jace fidgeted, leaning against the door awkwardly.

Ral ran a hand through his hair. "She fell off her broom. She said she felt dizzy."

"Is she okay? Did she break anything?"

He really hadn't been paying attention at all, had he?

"I caught her," Ral said. "Because _I_ was watching her."

At least Jace had the grace to look ashamed of himself. "Sorry," he mumbled. "Emmara wanted to—" He paused, the expression on his face turning peculiar. "I just—I've never been with someone like this, you know? I guess I haven't been a great friend this year, have I? Fuck, forget it. Is she okay?"

"She didn't get hurt from the fall," Ral said slowly. "But she's exhausted and dizzy, and I don't know why."

"There's a virus going round the girls' dorm," Jace said. "Emmara told me. Maybe it's that?"

"How's Emmara?" Ral asked abruptly.

The expression on Jace's face shifted from worry into a sort of happy dreaminess. "Merlin, she is _amazing_ ," he said. "She's so nice, she's always worrying about me. She—" he broke off. "Oh, uh, you meant, is she sick."

Ral nodded, eyebrows climbing into his hair.

"No, she's okay so far." Jace shuffled awkwardly. "Uh, Ral…do you…" he paused, then shook his head. "Never mind."

So, Emmara wasn't sick. The anger in Ral's chest collapsed into a kind of peculiar, rapidly-pulsing ache. Could she be responsible for Elspeth being sick? It made a weird kind of sense, if she'd cast a spell on Jace, for some reason. But then, he'd expect himself to be getting sick as well, and he wasn't. Nothing made any sense. He pressed an angry hand to his head, just in time for several bright sparks of electricity to leap from his wrist to land with painful jolts on his cheeks.

Jace jerked in surprise. "What was that?" he asked, and, to Ral's surprise, he almost thought he saw concern brewing in Jace's dark eyes.

"Just having some trouble controlling my lightning spells," Ral said gruffly, before he thought about it, and then realized a moment later that he wouldn't have felt comfortable saying that to anyone who wasn't Elspeth or Jace. And that maybe saying it to Jace right now was a mistake.

Taking a half-step forward, his friend laid his hand on Ral's arm. "Maybe we should—"

"Jace, there you are!" Jace jerked back, with a look that Ral thought hopefully might almost have been annoyance, at the sound of Emmara's voice. The next instant he was turning around, though, plastering a smile across his face.

"Sorry, Emmara, I didn't mean to abandon you," he said lightly. "I just needed to check on Elspeth."

"Well, is she all right?" Emmara asked. She was short and fat, Ral thought viciously, although he had to admit she looked less childish with her fluffy hair framing her face instead of trapped in two plaits, the way it had been when he first met her.

"We don't really know what's wrong." Jace shifted uncomfortably. "She's not hurt, though. Might just be that virus."

Emmara pulled a face. "I'm just waiting to catch it myself," she said. "I haven't felt bad so far, but it's nearly everyone. It's just a matter of time." Her slight French accent grew a little more pronounced as she spoke. "I 'ope it isn't my fault that people are catching it. I could 'ave brought something over from the Continent, perhaps."

"I'm sure it wasn't your fault, my love." The term of endearment sat strangely on Jace's lips as he crossed to put his arms around Emmara. Jace, who was usually afraid of public displays of affection, unless it was hugging his mother, and even then, for the past few years, he had turned tomato-red when doing so. He tipped Emmara's face up to him and kissed her gently. Ral growled unintelligibly.

"Perhaps we should get back to the pitch?" Emmara suggested. "They are substituting in another player for Elspeth, so they will be starting again soon, I would imagine." Her pale blue eyes gleamed mockingly in her heart-shaped face, but her voice was solicitous. "Ral, would you like to come with us?"

"Nah, I'm good," Ral said. "I'd rather stay until I know that Elspeth's going to be okay."

"Don't worry too much." Emmara stepped forward and laid her hand on Ral's arm. She smelled like Jace, which made the gaping hole in Ral's stomach open up just a little further. This close, her breasts brushed lightly against the front of his arm, and he felt himself growing a little warm. "I'm sure Elspeth will be all right," Emmara said comfortingly, and she went up on her tiptoes and brushed a gentle kiss across his cheek in highly European fashion. Ral swallowed hard.

"Come on, Emmara," Jace said, suddenly sharp, and Ral stared helplessly at the glare crossing his friend's face. He shook Emmara off his arm, and she smiled sweetly and went back to Jace, glancing over her shoulder at Ral as the two of them left.

As soon as they were gone, Ral collapsed back against the wall. "Fuck," he muttered.

* * *

Harry sighed as he pushed open the door to the teachers' lounge. He was tired and had a nagging headache that never quite seemed to go away these days.

"No, it's none of these. Drat." Luna and Hermione were seated in the middle of the floor, apparently poring over a pile of thick books that were presumably from the Hogwarts library. They had the old, dusty, unused look of books that had been tucked into the Restricted Section and then forgotten.

"Do you need any help?" he asked, with a tired sigh. At least his favorite armchair was free, he thought to himself as he sank into it and applied a cold hand to his tender head.

"No, we've just finished looking through all these." Hermione sat back, frowning. "You really can't remember anything except boats?" she asked Luna, who shook her head.

"What are you looking for?" Harry asked with some interest. Over the years, Hermione's pet research projects had been both fascinating and generally useful.

Luna looked up. "A story," she said. "I think I remember seeing it when we were part of the DA. But I can't remember anything about the title of the book except that it makes me think of boats."

"Boats?" Harry echoed, scratching his head. "That's a bit odd."

"We know," Hermione sighed. "We're pretty sure it's not actually about boats, but we can't figure out why it would make her think of them."

"So why are you looking for a book that isn't about boats?" Harry sank down into the squashy armchair with a sigh of relief at getting the weight off his sore feet.

Luna and Hermione glanced at each other, and then Luna looked up and pushed her hair out of her eyes. "I found…" she trailed off and chewed on her lip, then shivered.

"Do you want me to tell the story?" Hermione asked, and, to Harry's surprise, she put a hand on Luna's shoulder.

Nodding, Luna suddenly turned and buried her face against Hermione's side. The other woman froze briefly, then awkwardly put an arm around her. "I'm sorry," Luna said, her voice muffled by Hermione's robes. "I keep thinking that I—that I am all right, and then I think about it, and it's just all—" she waved a hand, "—all dark and cold, somehow."

"Here." Harry fumbled in his robes until he found the bar of chocolate he always carried around with him. It was slightly squishy but he pushed it into Luna's hand anyway. "This might help."

"Thank you," Luna said. "What a good idea."

On the floor, Hermione shifted her sitting position as if she expected Luna to draw back to eat the chocolate, but instead, Luna only sat up slightly, still leaning against her, as she began to unwrap it. Harry watched in some confusion. He hadn't realized Luna was quite so cuddly.

"So," Harry prompted. "Hermione. Story?"

Instead of starting the story, Hermione was just staring down at Luna's bright head, her mouth hanging very slightly open. She drew in her breath sharply when Harry spoke. "O-oh! Of course." Drawing herself up, she gave him a brief outline of an experience Luna had clearly told her about at length.

As she did, Harry felt a cold lump congealing in the pit of his stomach. Whatever Luna had stumbled onto sounded like serious dark magic. Especially since Luna clearly was still being affected by whatever it was. And if something had gotten _out_ , and they didn't even know what it was—it could be causing a lot of damage right now. The longer someone left it alone, the more damage it would do.

"I think I better go give it a look," Harry said slowly, as Hermione finished.

"Oh, Harry, no. We need you here. I know the Ministry is absolutely awful at this kind of thing because of all the bureaucracy, but can't you call in a favor from the Aurors?"

"They're still pretty stretched thin," Harry said, shifting uncomfortably. "I mean, I guess I could. I just—" he fidgeted. "—it's not that I don't trust them."

"You know you're a bit paranoid," Hermione said soothingly, but Luna straightened up.

"Would you?" she asked. Harry and Hermione looked at her. " _Would_ you go look? I've been awfully worried about it. I didn't know who to talk to, and I thought I ought to have been able to deal with it myself, I mean, you know, I was in the DA myself and everything, but I'm so out of practice…"

Hermione looked from Luna to Harry, opened and closed her mouth, then sighed. "I suppose if you were only gone for a little while, we could cover your classes," she said slowly. "It would be a bit of a crunch, but…" She frowned. "Don't go by yourself, Harry," she said. "That's absolutely foolish. If it's some kind of very dark magic, then you'd better take someone along. Maybe several someones."

Although he didn't like it, Harry had to admit she had a point. "Yeah," he said.

"I volunteer," a voice drawled from the other side of the room. Draco Malfoy sat up with a yawn from the couch on the other side of the room where he must have been napping.

" _Really_ ," Hermione protested.

"Sorry." Draco shrugged. "I didn't want to interrupt you."

"I suppose it doesn't matter that you were _eavesdropping_ ," Hermione responded severely. "But we can't have you walking off as well. Who would cover Potions?"

"Slughorn owes me a favor or two." Draco shrugged. "I'm sure we can drag him back out of retirement for a week. Besides, Harry, you'll want me there."

Harry stared at him. It was true that for the past several years, he and Draco had been working together well. A little awkwardly, maybe—their childhood history wasn't going to vanish immediately, and Harry didn't entirely know how to deal with the fact that Draco might have had a worse childhood than he himself had. But they weren't exactly close. Whenever he tried to breach the wall that seemed to have grown up between them, it felt as if Draco would pull back, and whenever that happened, Harry wondered why he was trying. They'd never been friends, so why did he want that now? He shook his head.

"Erm," he said. "Why?"

Draco lifted his eyebrows at him, and Harry squirmed internally. That expression always made him feel hot and cold at the same time, and right now it was worse than usual. "Because, my dear Harry," Draco sat up slowly and ran a long-fingered hand through his ash-blond hair, "I have the kind of insider experience with dark magic that you lot can only dream of. How many truly cooperative ex-Death-Eaters can you get hold of on short notice? Or do you _really_ think that this has nothing to do with Voldemort's crowd?"

"It's far too old for that!" Hermione said indignantly.

Draco gave her an indulgent smile. "The original enchantment, certainly. The _broken_ enchantment? Wizards don't just go around letting nasty things out of containment for shits and giggles."

Hermione huffed in irritation, but gave a sigh and a nod. "A week or two of Slughorn won't kill anyone, I suppose," she said in a longsuffering tone of voice. "If you really feel this _must_ be taken care of immediately."

"I think that it would be a good idea," Luna responded before Harry had the chance, and Hermione sighed again.

"All right. Do give me a day or two to keep the disruption to the students to a minimum."

Harry nodded, then glanced over again and caught Draco's eye. There was a hidden smirk on his friend's face. So, Harry thought, maybe he wasn't the only one who found the thought of battling something other than unruly teenagers to be a little bit exciting. He shook his head ruefully. Sometimes he wondered if he was really cut out to be a teacher.


	7. Fated Infatuation

Jace woke up late after being unable to fall asleep until something like three am. Despite having Emmara sharing his bed, he'd been having a much worse time sleeping than he had in years, and uneasily, disloyally, he wondered if he just slept better with _Ral_ in the same bed, not just another warm body. But Emmara was his girlfriend—surely she ought to be a good replacement. Even _that_ thought made him feel guilty. He didn't want to _replace_ Ral, but he didn't want to lose Emmara, either.

She seemed pretty irritated at him for oversleeping this morning, and maybe it wasn't fair to blame her. She'd had to practically drag him out of bed in an effort to get him to breakfast on time, and it hadn't really worked—he'd been too sleepy and logy to make it down before the end of breakfast, and then his stomach was too heavy for him to eat anything, though he snagged a roll before his first class.

"Why don't you just skip class?" Emmara suggested, but Jace thought uneasily that he'd been doing that too often these days. N.E.W.T.s were coming up, and he couldn't _completely_ blow them off, but when he said that to Emmara, she stalked off after saying icily, "I would think you'd recognize that a single class isn't going to change your whole career."

He'd meant to apologize as soon as he got through his first class, which was Potions, but somehow, by the end of it, he was feeling tired and frustratingly guilty. He hadn't worked on his individual project in several weeks now, and the only reason he wasn't in trouble was that he and Ral had a lot of leeway about when they were supposed to be working on them. But listening to Professor Malfoy's lecture both inflamed his curiosity—since what he was working on was a new version of the Bottled Dreams potion he still hadn't perfected—and made him feel deeply concerned about not getting _any_ work on it done. Up until today, it had seemed like a perfect opportunity to snog Emmara, but somehow that was feeling a lot less like a good excuse and a lot more like a good way to get himself expelled when the teachers found out. So he slipped out of Potions without talking to Emmara and hurried up to the tower where the individual studies were carried out.

He hadn't seen Ral in Potions or at breakfast, so he was surprised to find his friend seated on his customary bench, chewing his lip and staring at the gauntlet in front of him.

"Um, hi," Jace said, as he started gathering the ingredients he had stored and taking them over to his part of the room.

Ral looked up and paused. "Haven't seen you here in a while," he said.

Running a hand through his hair, Jace laughed uncomfortably. "Yeah, I guess." He shuffled his feet. "I was, uh…"

"Skiving class to snog Emmara?"

"Um…"

"Yeah, probably a bad idea. Don't think the profs will be happy if they find out."

Jace rubbed at his forehead. "It's not really your business," he said tightly, caught between the uncomfortable feeling that Ral was right and a nagging impulse to defend himself.

"Oh, yeah, sorry, stupid me, I forgot. I'm not your best friend anymore, am I?"

The words hurt. "What? Ral—no—I just—"

"Whatever." Ral turned his back to Jace and went back to working at his gauntlet.

Jace swallowed and numbly continued gathering his ingredients. Trying to chop his asphodel evenly was a nightmare—he hadn't done any potions preparation in several months, and he was squinting through a haze in front of his eyes. After ten minutes of failing to get anywhere, he looked up and sighed. "I—I'm sorry," he said.

Ral sighed as well. "Yeah, me too."

"It's just—you know—I've never really been in love before," Jace managed, putting down his knife. "And I guess—Emmara seems to think that the Potions thing—isn't that important." The words rang rather hollow in his mouth, his stomach rolling with a sudden strange nausea. It _was_ that important. It was one of his favorite things to do. But Emmara had always seemed to assume he'd rather spend time with her than in a "dusty old lab" and he hadn't wanted to disappoint her, for some reason. "I'm afraid she'll dump me," he blurted.

Quite slowly, Ral turned around and looked at him. "So what?" he said. "I mean, sure, she's cute, but you'd get over it. Isn't your favorite subject more important than getting laid?"

"But I'm in love with her." The words were out before Jace had a chance to think, and even as he said them, they sounded strange. _Why_ was he in love with her? She was gorgeous, of course, but she wasn't that much more attractive than, say, Chandra, with whom he'd had a rather ill-advised snog two years ago. And he was close friends with Chandra. What did he and Emmara even have in common? Still, the thought of ending things with Emmara made him feel vaguely ill and frightened, and he sheared away from it.

"Jace, you're just…you're acting weird."

"I'm not!" Jace responded immediately, then paused. "I mean…I don't know. Maybe I am. She makes me feel special, I guess. I don't want to lose that."

He expected Ral to protest, but instead his friend opened his mouth, made a noise, closed it again. "Mm," he said. "I see." Almost like a doctor assessing symptoms.

"Anyway, you _are_ my best friend," Jace continued hurriedly. "I'm sorry if I've been a shit this year."

Ral's shoulder went up and down, but he put his gauntlet down and walked across the room to Jace's lab station. "Show me what you're trying to do, I'm bored," was all he said.

It was much easier to remind himself of what he'd been trying to do with the project when he was explaining it to Ral instead of going over it again and again in his head. As he talked, he slowly started to slip back into the usual frame of mind—it wasn't his favorite thing to do, maybe, but he did enjoy it a lot. The only thing that was oddly disconcerting was his sudden awareness of Ral's presence.

The two of them had always been pretty physically close, but, Jace realized, it had been months since they'd last touched, and he didn't know what the touch had been—either an accidental elbow in the middle of the night or maybe, just maybe, a brief, awkward touch on the shoulder as they parted at Platform 9 ¾ for the summer. Presumably, the length of time it had been was what was responsible for the sudden tingling thrill that ran down his shoulder when Ral brushed against him.

And he hadn't really had many people stand this close to him in a while, except for Emmara, so it wasn't really _surprising_ that he'd find Ral's breath on his ear hard to ignore. Still, it was definitely kind of distracting. He had a strange feeling that he'd been this close to Ral recently, even though he knew he hadn't, and he had to shake off the impression.

"What else?" Ral prompted, and Jace realized he'd let his voice trail off.

"Oh, well, I guess I've been trying to figure out a way to—to—" He'd turned when Ral addressed him, and he couldn't turn away, couldn't move his eyes away from Ral's mouth. This was—probably not okay, right? Most of the time, staring at someone's mouth meant you wanted to—but he was dating Emmara. Cheating on her was _definitely_ not okay. Not that Jace wanted to cheat on her. Especially not with Ral. Because that would be all kinds of awkward. He tried again. "I've been trying to improve on the formula. It's got a few side effects like dizziness and disorientation, and I think that those could be mitigated if I can just tweak the ingredients some."

"You don't think that might just be what happens when you have someone else's dream in your head?"

"I know it isn't." Jace stuck out his tongue. "So do you."

"I dunno, your dreams in my head are usually pretty disorienting."

"Only because they're usually nightmares." Jace sighed. "That's another thing. If I can make it easier to bottle dreams, it'd be nice, because then I might be able to catch some of the non-terrible ones."

"Oh yeah? Like what?"

Which was when Jace remembered the dream he'd had the night before. He'd dreamed that he'd woken up and looked down at the lump beside him in the bed, and it had rolled over, and it was Ral, not Emmara. Which wasn't all that surprising, since he'd spent a lot more time sharing a bed with Ral than sharing one with Emmara. Except then he'd leaned down and kissed Ral on the lips, just as if it _was_ Emmara, and when he'd woken up he'd been—heat rose to the tips of Jace's ears. "Uh," he said intelligently. "I, uh, I'd better get back to working on this."

"That good, huh?" Ral smirked at him. "Was it even about Emmara?"

Jace's cheeks flamed hotter than he'd ever felt them. "O-Of course," he stammered. "Why would I have dreams about somebody I'm not dating?"

"Oh my god, it wasn't, was it? Was it about _Elspeth_?"

"No! God, no! That would be so weird!" Elspeth was like—his big sister or something, despite the fact they were basically the same age. _So_ , said a voice in his head, _doesn't that make Ral like your brother?_

"Was it a boy? Is that why you're so embarrassed? Was it Gideon?"

"I—I don't remember," Jace said desperately. _You're dating Emmara,_ he reminded himself fiercely, but the brush of Ral's warmth at his back was almost painful in his awareness.

"Fine," Ral sniffed, sounding more animated than Jace had heard him all this year. "Keep your secrets." He ruffled Jace's hair, and Jace felt his eyes slide closed because that just felt so _right_. This whole year, ever since he got back from France, everything had felt a little bit _off_. He liked Emmara a lot—he loved her—she was a whirlwind of tantalizing excitement, but it was a stressful whirlwind. Well, no one could say Ral wasn't a stressful whirlwind as well, but—but. Jace stalled. Right now, the only thing he wanted to do was turn around, grab Ral, and kiss him. Hard. And possibly remove several layers of clothing as well.

All right. So maybe he should break up with Emmara. Because then he could snog Ral breathless. Assuming Ral was up for it, of course. Still, Jace thought, a little dizzily, he thought this might be worth risking. Snogging Ral breathless. Yeah. But he couldn't do that until he'd broken up with Emmara, and he couldn't do that before this evening, when he could get a minute alone with her. So that meant snogging Ral would have to wait—Jace groaned under his breath—for at least six hours.

Well, he might as well get some work done in the meantime. Still, before he went back to explaining the potion properly, Jace leaned back against Ral and squeezed his hand. He figured he owed himself that much.

* * *

"So the plan is we hang out here at this—" Draco struggled not to turn up his nose, "—er, authentic Muggle, er, establishment, while we try to find Luna's mystery broken dark enchantment?"

Harry grinned at him, and Draco tried to pretend the grin had no effect. Damn Potter. The way he scrunched up his nose without realizing it when he was smiling broadly—just for a moment, just at the beginning—was stupidly endearing and also rather infuriatingly attractive. Draco knew that falling for Potter was a truly awful idea—the social stigma of a man dating a man was bad enough, even post-war, but that wasn't even taking into account the fact that the object of his affection was _Harry bloody Potter_ , savior of the Wizarding World, and Draco was an ex-Death Eater.

"It's called a Bed and Breakfast, Malfoy," he said. "Because they give you _bed_ and _breakfast_. Not exactly hard to remember."

"Yes, yes. Remind me again _why_ we're here?"

"You don't want to spend our charming vacation in an equally charming location?" Draco glared at him, and Harry grinned again. Damn it. "No one'll be able to find us here," he said pragmatically. "Something like this could attract some nasty dark wizards. The aurors still haven't got all of them, you know."

"Camouflage," Draco said, turning the idea over slowly. "With, perhaps, the added bonus of annoying your dear colleague?"

"Would I do that?" Harry responded with a wicked grin. "C'mon, it'll be an adventure for once."

"You know I'm not one of your Golden Trio members," Draco said snidely, deliberately using a term coined by the Daily Prophet that he knew that Harry hated. "I've never been all that big on adventures."

"Maybe you've just never been on adventures with the right person before."

Draco stumbled slightly as they started up the stairs of the old Muggle building, ending up with his face dangerously close to the worn carpet. "Oh, and I suppose _you're_ the right person to have an adventure with?" He didn't manage to lace his words with quite as much sarcasm as he'd intended, but either way, Harry ignored the tone.

"Of course I am."

"Of course you are," Draco mumbled in echo, then tripped in earnest. "God, Potter, couldn't we have just apparated to the approximate location? Made this a day trip?"

Harry didn't bother to grace this with a response, since it was a stupid idea. Apparating was a hassle from Hogwarts to begin with, and besides that, there was almost certainly a befuddlement or other sort of redirection charm around the place they were looking for. It would be easier to have a nearby base of operation. Easier, just inconvenient. Especially since they were taking Muggle accommodations. Draco sighed and hoisted his trunk up the rest of the narrow flight of stairs, not bothering with the levitation charm he knew would earn him a reproving look from Harry.

For his part, Harry was pausing outside a door, digging a key out of his appallingly tight Muggle jeans. Muggle clothing was stupidly uncomfortable, Draco had discovered, but as Harry bent over, he raised an interested eyebrow. It did have certain perks. "I hope you at least reserved us a room with two beds," he drawled. "I know the younger generation have taken to sharing without much thought, but I kick. And occasionally try to hex people in my sleep."

"Good to know," Harry grunted, shoving the door open with his shoulder and dragging his own battered suitcase into the room with him. "And, yes, Draco, I did get two beds, I know you like your space."

Light flooded the room suddenly, and despite the fact that Draco had spent enough time in places where Ral Zarek and Hermione Granger had installed electric lights, he was startled. Rooms always looked a bit different by Muggle lighting than they did by magical. Or maybe his brain was just playing tricks on him.

It was actually an oddly nice room. Definitely not ornate, nothing like the mansion Draco had grown up in. But maybe a little bit like his rooms at Hogwarts. It was small, with a pattern of blue flowers on the wallpaper, plain powder blue curtains, and two beds with comfortable-looking bedspreads and—a lot of pillows. Why were there so many pillows? He stared. That was at least six pillows per bed. Did Muggles use pillows for something other than wizards did? What use could anyone possibly have for six pillows?

Wrenching his attention away from the frankly absurd number of pillows, he noted the TV sitting on the wooden dresser across from the beds. Something else he didn't really have much experience with. Draco shook his head tiredly and went to set his trunk down at the foot of the bed, letting the door swing shut behind him. "I suppose we'll need a plan," he said, with a frown. "We have some hints from Lovegood, but we don't necessarily know where to look. Did you have any ideas?"

"It's basically Seventh Year all over again," Harry said with a rueful laugh. "Less difficult, really, because we know where to start and we're only looking for one evil dark artifact for a change. Pity 'Mione couldn't come, though. She's damn good at this kind of thing." And, oh, that look. Whenever Harry talked about Hermione, he got such a tender look in his eyes. Draco shook his head. None of his business. He certainly had no right to be jealous.

"Merlin," Draco sighed. "What's next? Are you going to start pining for Weasley?"

Someone knocked on the door. He and Harry exchanged looks. No one other than Hermione and Luna should know where they were, and they'd just walked in—it was unlikely to be a maid or anything like that. (Did 'bed and breakfast' establishments employ maids? Draco didn't know.) Carefully, Draco reached for his wand. "Let me get it," he said tersely.

"I'll back you up." Draco was mildly surprised at the lack of argument, but he filed it under 'deal with later', and carefully moved toward the door, hand still on his wand. Unfortunately, the old building didn't even have a peephole in the door. It did have a chain lock, however. Draco slipped the chain on and opened the door a crack, coming face to face with a sudden deluge of freckles underneath a shock of red hair.

He blinked. "Wait. Weasley?"

A wand was shoved under his chin. "Where the fuck is Harry, what've you done with him?"


	8. Teysa, Orzhov Scion

"Hey, um, can I talk to you?"

"Jace, I was just looking for you! Have you had anything to eat all day?" Emmara sounded faintly displeased, and he paused to think about it.

"Well, I guess not, but I wanted to—"

"Have you had anything to _drink_ all day?" she asked severely. They were in the corridor just outside the Hufflepuff boys' dormitory, where he'd finally managed to track her down after class. He might've stayed a little late working with Ral in the independent studies room. He hadn't noticed what time it was, too wrapped up in his work and in the fact that this was the first time he'd really spent time with Ral all semester, which was honestly a little worrisome.

"Uh," he said, shaking his head, trying to get him mind back on the conversation with Emmara. _You get to snog Ral if you break up with her_ , he reminded himself, then felt abruptly guilty for thinking it. Shuffling awkwardly, he tried to engage with the question she had asked him. "No, I haven't, I don't think. Emmara, I—"

"Here, have this, you idiot. I saved you some dinner." She pressed a sandwich into his hand—roast beef, his favorite—and the flask of water she always carried.

Jace squirmed, feeling even guiltier. "I really, um, this is kind of, um, I need to talk to you…" he trailed off.

"Eat and drink something, and then I will be happy to listen."

"I'm not—sure you'll be happy—" he said haltingly, but he took a bite of the sandwich and washed it down with a gulp of water just to appease her. She stepped forward, breasts brushing slightly against his front, leaned up and kissed his cheek, then rested her head softly against his shoulder.

" _Merci_ , Jace. You know, I do worry about you. Now, what did you want to talk to me about?"

Jace's stomach twisted. She was so lovely, and so caring, and so thoughtful. She gave a little wriggle against him, and he remembered why he'd asked her out in the first place. That cute little toss of her hair. The adorable little smile. The curve and swell of her breasts even beneath her robes. God, she was beautiful. And she'd said yes to _him,_ Jace Beleren, grubby, boring, nerdy _legilimens_. She wasn't bothered by the legilimency thing; unlike a lot of people, she found it fascinating. She'd helped him devise all kinds of tests for it—how could he have thought she didn't care if he succeeded at what he was good at? Potions just wasn't where his main talent lay.

"Um," he said. "Oh, it's nothing, I guess. I'm just really tired. And anxious."

She looked up at him from under her lashes. "I could help with that, perhaps?"

Biting his lip, Jace nodded, feeling heat creep up his ears and down his stomach. "Mm, yeah, that, um, that would be nice."

"Let me get those robes off," she breathed, pulling his head down for a long, lingering kiss. Funny, Jace thought vaguely as his hands slid down her shoulders, she smelled almost like the lab, that weird chemical smell mixed with ozone. It was strangely comforting.

* * *

Ral decided not to go to dinner. He figured, if he was just going to be dripping sparks everywhere, other people might be a little uncomfortable with him around. He'd been getting through to Jace—his friend had almost been fucking _normal_ while they were playing around in the lab. Fuck, he'd almost thought—the way Jace was looking at him and brushing up against him, that just _maybe_ he was actually—Ral shook his head fiercely. They'd always been pretty touchy-feely, especially for guys. Didn't mean that Jace thought of him that way. Didn't mean he thought of Jace that way, either. Obviously. He wasn't jealous, he told himself again, tiredly. It was starting to sound a little fake even to him.

Moodily, he kicked at a stone, and watched it skitter across the lake, sent a bolt of lightning shooting after it, and then guiltily realized he hadn't even formed the spell in his mind. It had just sort of—happened.

"Good evening, Mr. Zarek."

Ral jumped about a foot into the air, then whirled around to find Professor Lovegood standing behind him. She moved stupidly quietly. "Uh, hi," he said, shuffling his feet, and wondering if she'd seen his little lightning trick.

"Would you like some help with that?"

Ah, fuck. "With what?"

"The lightning." Lovegood smiled, tipping her head to one side. "You're quite talented with it. Elementalism, I expect. I'd ask if it runs in the family, but you're a Muggleborn, aren't you?"

"Elementalism?" Ral asked sharply.

"Oh, yes." The professor waved her hand. "It's more common in other places in the world, but I think Ms. Nalaar may be one as well. It's an affinity for a kind of magic dealing with a particular kind of element, sometimes it's a bit hard to control at first. I have some books on it, if you want."

Ral stared down at his hands and back up at her, feeling a little bit deflated. He'd been expecting to have to be on the defensive. "Um, thanks, sure," he said a little awkwardly.

"Don't worry about it, just be careful when you get emotional. It's generally good form not to electrocute the people around you."

"Electrocution means they die," Ral corrected automatically. "You mean shock."

"Oh, yes, it would be good if you could avoid that as well," Lovegood's smile widened, and Ral honestly could not tell if she was joking. "I hear you're working on a magical artifact to transform lightning kinds of things, too. I wonder if you could use it to control your own lightning?"

That was—an _excellent_ idea. Ral liked that idea very much. Transforming and storing the electricity that he kept accidentally producing—that would make it _so fucking easy_ to power stuff. Damn. Why hadn't he thought of that? He'd been too busy worrying about his lack of control and trying to make it stop. That was kind of annoyingly dumb. Stupid jerkbrain. He wanted to hit it. "Yeah, probably," he said, remembering that Professor Lovegood was still there. "Thanks."

"You seem a bit worried. Is there anything else you'd like to talk about?"

He shuffled his feet together. Was it worth it to tell her about Jace possibly-being-under-a-spell? Ral opened his mouth, then shut it again. He really did not want to hear about how he was just jealous again. He was tired of not being taken seriously. He sighed, then shook his head. "It's nothing. I'll be fine."

* * *

Jace hadn't realized that Chandra was even in the Hufflepuff girls' dorm when he went to look for Emmara, so he was definitely not expecting it when she punched him in the face. It hurt. Jace said, "ow!" indignantly, and then sat down. "Merlin, what the hell, Chandra?"

"You broke Ral's heart," she snapped. "I should be asking you that!"

"I did not!" Jace protested, dabbing at his nose. There didn't seem to be any blood.

"You bloody well did." She stood over him with her hands on her hips, and Jace cringed slightly.

"That's absurd," he said, as calmly as possible. "How could I possibly have done that?"

"Gee, I don't know, maybe by stringing him along and cuddling and all kinds of things—" Jace flinched at that, guiltily thinking back to their interactions the day before, "—for years, and then going and asking out a bitchy French girl instead of him? You guys were _sleeping together_."

"Okay, yes, but not like that! We've been through this about a thousand times!"

"It still counts!" They stared at each other, breathing hard. Jace was the first to look away, feeling faintly queasy.

"This is stupid," he said finally. "I wasn't stringing Ral along, and I haven't broken his heart. Have you seen Emmara?"

At the question, Chandra swelled up as if she was about to explode, but before she could actually punch him again, someone else called her name. "Have you seen Nissa?" Tamiyo asked. The small Ravenclaw gave Jace a rather bemused smile, and then looked back to Chandra.

"I was just looking for her," Chandra said, sending Jace another glare. "She's probably napping. We were up late last night—" Chandra paused, "—um, doing homework."

Still rubbing his nose, Jace got slowly to his feet. "Uh huh," he said. "I'm surprised she's in _this_ dorm room," he said pointedly.

"Do you _want_ me to hit you again?" Chandra snarled. "Sorry, Tamiyo. That's her bed, over there."

Tamiyo nodded in thanks and headed across the room, while Jace continued to watch Chandra nervously out of the corner of his eye. "Nissa," he heard Tamiyo say, "I'm sorry to wake you, but—Nissa?" Tamiyo looked up uncertainly. "Does she usually sleep this deeply?" she asked.

Chandra frowned. "No, she's a pretty light sleeper." She and Jace looked at each other, and Jace suddenly felt his heart skip a beat.

"Nissa?" he said as well and hurried across the room. Nissa was huddled in her bed, knees drawn up to her chest, eyes shut. He shook her shoulder, and her head lolled to the side. "Oh, Merlin."

"What is it?" Chandra's voice peaked with sudden terror. "Nissa?" She shouldered Jace out of the way and knelt beside the other girl. "Wake up! Hey!"

"Is she breathing?" Jace asked, suddenly terrified.

Chandra uttered a noise that, under other circumstances, might have been comical, a small, breathy squeak. She bent hurriedly over Nissa. "Ye-es," she said uncertainly after a minute. "Merlin, Nissa, please. Please wake up."

"I'll go get Madam Pomfrey," Tamiyo said in a small voice.

Jace stood back, not knowing what to do, trying not to stare as Chandra desperately tried to wake Nissa up. Finally, his friend took Nissa's hand and pressed it to her cheek in such an affectionate display that Jace suddenly wondered if the two of them were—he covered his face with his hands, thought about Elspeth, tried _not_ to think about this happening to Ral. He felt as if he was going to be sick.

* * *

Harry sighed and paused to look out the window at the rapidly-darkening sky. What an evening. First, he'd had to convince Ron that no, Draco wasn't holding him hostage, yes, he wanted to be here. Then he'd had to convince Draco that Ron wouldn't fuck everything up simply by being there. He still didn't actually have a clue how Ron had found them or what he was doing here, because he'd been too damn busy trying to avoid the entire hotel room exploding.

"Hey, mate." They'd agreed Ron could at least stay the night, although Draco had been adamant that Ron would be taking the floor on the furthest side of the room from him. Harry, who'd heard a little about Ron's behavior toward Hermione and Draco in the recent years, was inclined to agree.

"D'you want to tell me what's going on now?" Harry said. Maybe he was a little snippy, but he'd actually been looking forward to having a little time by himself with Draco. Was that weird? It might be weird.

"I got worried about you!" Ron snapped back. "I wanted to talk to you about something, and when I found you, I figured out Malfoy was there as well, and you weren't at Hogwarts. Can you blame me?"

"You realize he hasn't been a threat in…" Harry counted on his fingers, laughed ruefully. "Merlin, almost ten years?"

"Yeah, well, he could've been playing a long game," Ron muttered, running a hand through his red hair. He held up a hand when Harry looked skeptically back at him. "I know I've been fucking up for a while now, but I've been trying to do better. I even got a therapist like you suggested."

Harry's eyebrows went up at that. He and Ron had had a screaming match a while back that had culminated in him yelling something about Ron needing a therapist—he hadn't expected that to be taken seriously, even if he thought it was true. Harry thought, rather guiltily, that he also probably needed a therapist, but he still hadn't been able to get himself to try and find one. He figured he'd be more comfortable with a Muggle, but that would present its own problems.

"I fucked up again," Ron admitted, and that was so surprising to hear from him that Harry turned slowly away from the window to look at him. "I shouldn't've assumed you couldn't take care of yourself, even if I don't like Malfoy. Sorry, mate."

"Yeah, well, apology accepted," Harry said warily. "So why were you looking for me?"

"I want to apologize to Hermione," Ron said, shuffling his feet on the carpet. "I haven't talked to her in a few years, and I miss her." He put a hand to his forehead. "But I don't want her to think it's a romantic thing, I just miss her as a friend. I mean, I still think she's gorgeous, but I don't fancy her anymore. And I really fucked everything up when we were together."

"Yeah, you did," Harry agreed, leaning back against the window. "But I think she misses you, too."

"Yeah?" Ron smiled a little. "I guess that's good. I was so fucking paranoid after everything, I just…my head was pretty bad there for a while."

"Yeah," Harry agreed. "Mine, too."

His friend nodded awkwardly. "It's not really how I thought life was supposed to go, I guess," he blurted, staring at the floor. "Y'know? I sort of thought we'd kill the evil wizard and then live happily ever after, me and 'Mione, you and Ginny. Have kids, send them to Hogwarts…and when it didn't happen like that, I didn't…" he trailed off again and shook his head. "I dunno. Don't think I dealt very well."

"Mmm." Harry shuffled his feet again. "I'm shite at this, you know," he said, abruptly.

"Oh, yeah, me, too, mate. Sorry for putting you on the spot."

"S'okay. Shake?" Harry put out his hand awkwardly, and Ron grinned at him and took it.

"I promise I'll fix things up with Hermione. Seriously, what are you doing all the way out here in the middle of nowhere, though?"

Harry ran a hand through his hair. "Trying to track down a possible dark wizard," he admitted, and Ron's eyebrows went into his hair.

"With only Malfoy as backup?"

"We've worked well together the past few years," Harry said, aware that he sounded vaguely defensive.

"Well, I still don't like him," Ron answered.

"And I don't like you, Weasley." Draco was back from taking his shower, and Harry glanced over to see that he was wearing an emerald-green robe, open to the waist, his blond hair plastered wetly to his head. The strip of pale, damp skin down the center of his chest was oddly compelling, and Harry had to force himself to look away, in case Draco or Ron noticed he was staring.

"Oh, piss off, Malfoy," Ron said tiredly.

"Oy," Harry said. "I don't want you two getting into another argument. You're both my fuh—my friends—" (that was a strange thought) "—and we've got to figure this thing out, in case it really is something dangerous."

"Let me help," Ron said. "I'd feel better."

"If he wasn't alone with the ex-Death Eater, you mean?" Draco drawled. "I don't particularly want your company, Weasley."

Harry squirmed. He hated feeling as if he was playing referee or taking sides, but… "Draco, more people's not a bad thing," he said. "I trust Ron, and he's already helped me take out—well, you know. Voldemort."

Draco opened his mouth as if he was about to protest, then shut it again. "I suppose you are more experienced than I, Mr. Weasley," he said grudgingly. "As long as you've got Potter's back."

"Of course I have his back!" Ron said hotly. "It's you I'd be—"

"Ron! Shut the fuck up," Harry said before he could finish. "You're coming along. Just drop it."

Ron ground his teeth together and folded his arms, but he nodded. "Fine," he said. "I'll stay here tonight, get some supplies in the morning. Can you tell me what exactly we're looking for?"

"Happy to," Harry agreed warily, letting his eyes slide back to Draco for a moment. He couldn't read the expression on his friend's face, but he felt his stomach twist a little guiltily. He needed to get Draco alone at some point to talk, explain, maybe apologize. He'd find time, he promised himself. He would.

* * *

Ral was spending a lot of time skulking outside the hospital wing these days. First Elspeth, now Nissa. And now Elspeth wasn't waking up at all anymore. And Chandra had already had one dizzy spell bad enough that she'd fallen against him during Potions, but Madam Pomfrey _still_ didn't know what was wrong. Now, given just how dismissive of Emmara Jace had been during their one individual study and how he'd promptly gone back to cooing over her mere hours later, Ral was one hundred percent positive that she had him under a spell and was probably also responsible for the "bug" going round the girls' dorm. After all, both Elspeth and Nissa were Hufflepuffs. Just like Emmara.

Naturally, no one was going to listen to him. It was first-year all over again, Ral thought irritably. But fine. He'd saved Jace once, he could do it again. Deciding to stop worrying indecisively and actually _do_ something made him feel a lot better, but he still needed to figure out how to start.

The door to the hospital wing opened. "But—" someone was saying.

"I'm sorry," Madam Pomfrey's harassed voice said, "but as you are neither enrolled as a student here nor a relative of the young lady in question, I cannot let you see her."

"I am—"

"I don't care if you're the Prince of Whales, deary, the answer is still no." A small figure was maneuvered out of the hospital wing, and the door was shut in her face.

At first, Ral thought she was a child, since she couldn't have reached even five feet in height, but glancing down at her, he saw she definitely had too much figure for a child. The young woman looked up and frowned at him. "What?" she snapped.

"Sorry." He took a step backward.

The young woman breathed in and blew out her breath in a sigh, then waved a hand at him. "No, it's not your fault," she said glumly. "I was just hoping to see Elspeth, and apparently I am not 'permitted to do so'."

"Who are you?" Ral asked in confusion. She wore a long white robe trimmed with black edges and emblazoned in the center with a round circle with twelve large triangular protrusions radiating outward from it.

Drawing herself up to her full height, the girl answered, "I am Teysa Karloff of House Orzhov." Deflating slightly, she continued, "And I'm Elspeth Tirel's penpal."


	9. Rally

The new arrival turned out to be extremely hungry in addition to frustrated. Ral took her down to the kitchens and politely asked the house elves to get her some food, which they were more than happy to do.

"So you're Elspeth's pen pal?" he said, after Teysa had eaten her way through three pumpkin sandwiches and was finally looking as if she were going to slow down.

Teysa nodded, neatly patting a few crumbs away from the corner of her mouth with her napkin. "And when I didn't hear from her in a few weeks, I got concerned," she explained. "We've been writing back and forth for years, and she has never missed a response."

Chewing on his lip, Ral made a split-second decision. "Okay, so I think I know who did this to her," he said, then put up a hand to stop Teysa from rising up into a whirlwind of fury. She would probably have fallen off the high stool they had put her on anyway; her feet were dangling about a foot above the ground. "Nobody believes me, so maybe I—" he grimaced, "—it's _possible_ that I'm wrong, but I don't think so."

Quickly, he brought Teysa up to speed on the events of the semester.

"Well," she said, pulling a face, "I do think you might be jealous—" Ral growled at her, "—but I also think you're correct, so it doesn't matter."

"I just don't know what to fucking _do_ about it," Ral complained. "I mean, I guess I could try to follow Emmara or something? But I don't even know if that would work, and those aren't the kind of spells I know how to cast. I'm not so good at subtle."

"I don't know how to cast them, either, but I can direct you to do so." Teysa's eyes were sharp. "I'm an excellent tutor, and I have a good knowledge of subterfuge and spying."

"But if you can't cast them yourself—"

"I'm a squib." Teysa's admission made her face screw up as if she'd swallowed a lemon. "I can't cast spells."

Well, that did explain why she wasn't at school at Hogwarts. "I'm a Muggleborn," Ral shrugged. "Hell, I nearly went to high school at a Muggle school. Well, I guess I wouldn't have because I wouldn't want to leave Jace and Elspeth, but I bet I'd have learned a lot."

Teysa's thin eyebrows went up expressively. "Hm," she said, as if she hadn't been expecting that reaction. "Well, I'm sure I can teach you some very useful spells." She gave him a thin smile. "And then we can figure out exactly what is going on."

First things first, Ral thought. They needed a place for Teysa to stay, and spending time in the Hufflepuff common room or dormitories was definitely not a good idea. Ral got on all right with the other Slytherins, but he didn't spend much time in the dungeon as a rule; someone might notice. He wasn't close to anyone in Ravenclaw. Well, what was left was pretty obvious. Ral grinned darkly. Emmara was going to be sorry she'd fucked with Jace, and maybe even sorrier that she'd fucked with Nissa.

"C'mon," he said to Teysa.

"Where are we going?" As she asked, she carefully got to her feet, wincing a little. "Damn."

"What's wrong?"

"It's nothing," Teysa snapped, and Ral paused at her sudden irritation, then shrugged.

"All right then," he said. "We're going to find a friend."

He had been a little worried that Chandra would still be hanging around the Hospital Wing instead of back in her dorm, but they had go slowly, partly because Teysa seemed to be limping slightly, and partly because Ral wasn't sure that he wanted to run into anyone else with her. There might be awkward or annoying questions, since he had no idea what the provisions were for non-wizard visitors at the school who weren't relatives.

When they reached the Gryffindor common room, it was deserted apart from Gideon, who had his feet curled up under him as he squatted on the couch, frowning over a Potions textbook. He looked up briefly and nodded at Ral, smiled politely at Teysa.

"Is that your sister?" he asked Ral.

"Oh, ah—" Before Ral had quite decided, Teysa smiled winningly and answered for him, "Yes, that's me."

"Um, yeah, Gideon, this is Teysa," Ral said, wondering if they really looked that much alike. "Teysa, Gideon. Hey, we were just looking for Chandra, is she around?"

Gideon's forehead creased back into a frown. "She's up in the dorm," he said. "She's kind of upset. You, um, you might want to be careful going up there. She tends to—break things."

"Been there." Ral shrugged and led Teysa up the stairs towards the Gryffindor girls' dormitories.

He didn't bother to knock, opting instead to just throw open the door. This turned out to nearly be a painful error, because a wave of crackling flame was suddenly heading directly for his face. Luckily for him, he'd had his hand on his wand, and he managed to snap it up and shout, " _Protego_!" before he and Teysa were charred to a crisp.

"Oh," Chandra said, dully. "It's you. Sorry."

"Yeah, what'd you think?"

Chandra was sprawled on her bed, idly playing with her wand—well, maybe not so idly. She stared up at him, sighed, and shrugged.

"This is Teysa," Ral said, letting his new friend squeeze in the door behind him. "She's here to help us get rid of Emmara."

"Oh really?" Chandra sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She looked at Teysa skeptically. "How exactly is a ten-year-old going to help?"

Teysa stared her down levelly, drawing herself up to her full height of slightly-less-than-five-feet. "I am seventeen and a half," she said, "and I happen to be the heir to the Orzhov family, so I have a great deal of experience with dark magic."

"Huh," Chandra said. "What are you doing here?"

"I came to look for Elspeth."

"Oh," said Chandra, then, "Ohhhh. Oh wow."

"So can she stay here? Seems like the easiest place for her. I think it's better if Emmara doesn't know about her."

"Yeah, I'll figure something out." Chandra's face puckered slightly. "Um, I'm sorry about the, um, the fire thing," she said rapidly, staring at her feet.

"I'm fine." Ral rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment. "It's not a problem."

"I'm not sure what happened."

"Professor Lovegood said you might be an elementalist," Ral offered. "Like me."

"A what?"

He shook his head. "We can talk about it another time. Right now I'd really like to figure out what the fuck Emmara is doing to Jace and the others and how to stop it."

"Right. Let's see how good you two are at magic," Teysa smirked.

* * *

Hermione collapsed into bed with a sigh. She had been intending to do a little work this evening, and then read through some of the more promising titles that she and Luna had hunted out of the library, but she was just so tired. Maybe she'd just go to bed early, just this once—

A knock on her door startled her back to full wakefulness. For a moment, she considered turning over and just going to sleep, but, with a sigh, she decided against it. Heaving herself out of bed was more of an effort than she felt it should have been. She stood for a moment, rubbing her eyes and trying to smooth her hair, and then, finally, she answered the door.

Outside, Luna was shifting from foot to foot. She looked up with a hopeful smile when she saw Hermione. "Good evening!" she said brightly, and Hermione had to smile back. It was almost unsettling, how warm and wonderful everything seemed when Luna was around. Something about her just lit up whatever room she was in. "I wondered if you wanted to go through some more of the books together."

If it had been anyone else, Hermione would have said that she really ought to get some sleep instead, but her mind weighed the thought of an extra hour of sleep versus an extra hour of Luna, and Luna came out miles ahead almost instantly. "I'd—I'd like that," she replied. "Do come in."

Luna had been in Hermione's small quarters before, though they usually spent most of their time together in the teachers' lounge, but tonight she hovered as Hermione slowly got out the books she'd been planning to look over, and Hermione realized that she had left several stacks of ungraded papers obscuring every seat in the room. She laughed and patted the bed next to her. "I'm sorry, I honestly meant to clear this place up a bit yesterday," she told Luna. "I've just been dreadfully tired lately."

"Oh—that's fine." Strangely, Luna was almost stammering. "Er, are you sure?"

Hermione glanced back at her to see that both of Luna's cheeks were flushed, and her hands were twined rather nervously behind her back. "Yes, of course," she answered, a little blankly. "Why would I mind?"

Luna blinked rapidly and smiled widely. "Oh, no reason," she said. "Just, you know, sometimes one's—one's robe can have grab—grabknacks without one knowing about it, and I wouldn't want you to get—itchy."

Hermione raised an eyebrow as Luna moved jerkily closer. "I believe you made that up," she said slowly.

"I did not," Luna responded immediately. "I'd never—just make something up." Her cheeks had definitely turned bright red. "It would be—" she waved a hand, "—unethical for an expert in unusual creatures to simply make something up off the top of her head." She looked to the side, then sighed. "Although perhaps you're right that I don't—exactly—believe that grabknacks exist. Their provenance was disputed as far back as the seventeenth century, and, well, by now, even people who are more open-minded about magical creatures—don't really—think there's much evidence…"

"Are you all right?" Hermione asked sleepily. "I really don't mind you sitting on my bed. I don't mind most people sitting on my bed, really, but I especially wouldn't mind you doing it."

"Especially me?" Luna echoed. "Then I won't refuse, but, um…" She sat gingerly on the side of the bed, then sighed. "'Mione," she said in a small voice. "I know people think I'm odd. Well, I mean. I _am_ odd."

She looked suddenly sad and small and almost drooping as she sat on Hermione's bed, her hands bunching together in the robe above her knees.

"Yes," Hermione agreed, sliding over to her and wondering whether she needed to be comforting. She had never been exactly good at 'comforting.' When Ron or Harry had problems, she was far better at offering solutions than comfort, but she was aware that sometimes people didn't actually need their problems _fixed_ , per se. "I mean, I suppose you're odd, but your friends don't mind. We like oddity. I like oddity."

"When I was nineteen, I kissed one of my friends, and she definitely didn't like it," Luna said abruptly. "You see, I thought she might like it, because I thought she might like me like that, but she didn't. I'm not very good at knowing if someone would like me to kiss them. And it gets awkward, and people think I'm odd. Which I don't normally mind at all, but when people don't want to be around me because I'm odd, I sometimes get sad. Especially if they're people I like very much."

Hermione stared at her, feeling her own cheeks heat just a little. She hadn't spent much time considering romantic situations since the one with Ron imploded so horribly, and she hadn't dwelled on the fact that the signals she and Luna had been sending each other were possibly a little less than platonic. But there had been a good deal of touching and hugging—more than Hermione was used to, or generally comfortable with, even with close friends. And the way she'd found herself looking at Luna at odd moments, even the first time she'd seen her this year, in the loo at that awful party. As if she didn't want to look away.

"Luna," she said. "Erm, do you want to kiss me?"

Luna turned to her, and Hermione was a little concerned to see that there were tears welling up her eyes. "Well, yes," she admitted. "I _want_ to. But I don't want you not to want to be around me anymore."

"I, er," said Hermione. She slid a hand to the side and touched the top of Luna's hand, feeling the tight tension riding in the top of her friend's knuckles. "Actually, I—I think I'd like to kiss you, too."

"You would? Really?"

Suddenly feeling strangely shy, Hermione forced herself to nod.

"Oh," Luna said, smiling. "That's very nice." She blinked once, and a tear rolled out of her eye and down her nose. She reached up and brushed it away. "Oh, dear," she said. "That's awfully silly that my eyes are still doing this, then."

Taking a deep breath, Hermione awkwardly moved one hand up and cupped Luna's cheek. "I honestly don't mind," she breathed, and she pushed the golden strands of Luna's hair back, leaned forward, and brushed her lips against Luna's. Before she could pull back, Luna's hand was in her hair, and Luna was kissing her back as well, sighing into her mouth. It felt wonderful.

Luna's hand turned over beneath hers and laced their fingers together. Breathlessly, insistently, she kissed the corner of Hermione's mouth. "I like this," she said. "I like this quite a bit."

"Me, too," Hermione admitted. The back of her head felt odd, though, the tiredness that she'd almost forgotten coming back with force. "Tired, though," she mumbled. "I think I need to sleep."

"Oh—I'm sorry—I'll leave you to sleep."

Hermione smiled hazily through the veil of sleepiness. "No, no," she protested. "Why don't you stay?" She still hadn't managed to change out of her robes, had she? Oh well.

"Are you sure? I mean—the grabknacks—"

Giggling, still desperately sleepy, Hermione grabbed Luna's sleeve. "Definitely sure. Don't mind being itchy anyway." She pulled her friend down onto the bed, curling against her immediately. The last thing she heard before the darkness claimed her was Luna's soft, happy sigh.


	10. Steelclad Serpent

"I still don't like him," Ron grumbled. He, Harry, and Draco were clambering over a particularly rough set of scattered stones as they tried to make their way up the tor that Draco had identified as their next most likely location.

"Oh, shut up, Ron," Harry said tiredly. "You don't have to."

"People don't just change."

" _You're_ trying to."

Ron gave a growl at that, but subsided. He had at least managed not to be rude to Draco's face over the past few days, which Harry considered to be a small miracle. They didn't really have the breath to be arguing anyway. Harry would rather have done the search from a broom, but Draco pointed out it was too easy to miss things that way, so here they were. Harry had discovered he was missing Hermione badly. Though she and Ron sniped at one another, at least he didn't feel as if they were actually going to kill each other if someone misstepped. Keeping an eye on Ron and Draco was exhausting, though, Harry had to admit, Draco had actually been politer than Ron, if distant.

Still, it was discouraging. Harry thought he and Draco had finally been getting used to one another, like they might actually be able to become something more than casual colleagues, and then Ron had to show up and fuck everything up. Even if he had been trying to be concerned, it was not a variety of concern Harry had a great deal of desire to deal with right now. And scrambling all over the country didn't leave him much time to do anything other than mentally complain about it, either.

In frustration, he started climbing faster, and managed to outstrip both Draco and Ron in getting to the top of the tor. Breathing hard, he pulled himself over the top and paused to catch his breath, then found himself shivering. Up here, the wind was suddenly bone-chilling, and there was a strange dimness in the air he hadn't been expecting. Harry felt his heartrate speed up—this might be it, finally.

He pulled his wand out of his robes as a precaution and scanned the landscape. Apart from the chilly feeling in the air, at first glance there was nothing terrible out of place, just a circle of uneven, rocky ground covered in moss. Still, the chill in the air and the way the back of his neck prickled told him that there might be something more here than met the air. " _Ostendi carmeni—_ " he began, starting to incant a spell to reveal active charms on the location.

There was a loud whooshing sound, and he felt something that seemed cold and hot at the same time flare up in front of him, but before anything else could happen, Draco was there, tackling him to the ground. His wand was out as well, but Harry couldn't hear if he was saying anything over the sudden howling roar and icy chill. For a moment, it was like being caught in an earthquake, the world rocking and shaking around them. Draco grunted in pain, and Harry shut his eyes, trying to reorient himself.

He might have passed out for a minute, he wasn't sure. What seemed like a moment later, he was coughing out a lungful of dust, and Draco was groaning next to him while Ron shouted his name. "Shit, Harry, are you all right, mate?"

His first attempt at a response was unintelligible due to more coughing, and he waved a hand a Ron, who was hovering frantically and apparently trying to decide whether to slap him on the back. "I'm okay," he managed, on his second attempt at vocalizing. "How's Draco?"

"What the fuck happened?" Ron blurted out, kneeling beside them, and hesitantly turning to Draco, who, at this point, was swearing a blue streak. Harry relaxed slightly because if Draco was capable of the creativity required for some of the obscenities he was letting out, he wasn't dying.

"I don't know exactly," he said. "There was a spell geared to go off when I tried to use the revelatory incantation. Seemed like dark magic, but I didn't recognize it."

Draco coughed, sitting up. "Damn it, Potter," he said heavily. "Weren't you the one who was an Auror?"

Since this was one of the things Harry had already been thinking frustratedly, he groaned, and put a hand to his face. "Yeah, I just didn't recognize that spell at all."

"I've never seen it either," Ron pointed out. "The place felt off, but there's none of the obvious tells you'd expect from this kind of thing."

"Then I suppose it's lucky my father thought it necessary to drill me in medieval and pre-medieval curses," Draco drawled. "I should think that one was from as far back as Merlin's era or even earlier." He winced, trying to move, and hissed in pain.

"Luna didn't tell us about anything like this," Harry frowned. "D'you think we stumbled across _another_ dark magic site?"

Draco shook his head. "Look there," he said. "Beneath the moss. The stones are broken, and in the center, the earth is churned up as if something was buried there. No, I think Luna just got lucky."

"She said she found the remains of a befuddlement charm, I think," Harry pointed out. "Surely her snooping around to find that out should've triggered this?"

"Old magic is unreliable," Draco returned, wincing again. "Old enough and the spell might have been unraveling, or maybe she just casts her spells oddly enough it didn't recognize her. Old spells sometimes don't recognize newer ones as well as they ought to, with the way magic evolves." He shrugged. "Ah, fuck, I should _not_ have done that."

Staring at the drawn, pale face before him, Harry was abruptly concerned again. "Look, we can mark this spot pretty easily," he said. "We should head back now and make sure you're okay."

"I'm fine," Draco snapped, but when he tried to get up, he yelped in pain again.

"You're not." Harry stood first, putting out a hand to help his friend to his feet. "We can afford to wait another day. You're injured, we need to deal with it, and we need to make sure the curse won't have lingering effects."

Draco took the hand, but made a face. "As long as you promise not to send me to St. Mungo's."

"We'll take care of it ourselves. Ron and I've plenty of practice taking care of this sort of thing. Right, Ron?"

"What? Oh, yeah, sure, mate." To Harry's surprise, Ron gave a bemused smile. "Yeah. We can take care of it. Um. Draco." The sound of Ron calling him 'Draco' instead of 'Malfoy' made Harry's eyebrows rise sharply, but he decided not to make a big deal out of it.

After they'd managed to get Draco back on his feet, they had to mark the location, which they did on their map, Harry not being too eager to try any other magic nearby in case of setting off any other age-old curses. Finally, they started limping back the way they had come.

It took them twice as long to make their way back to the bed-and-breakfast as it had taken them to walk out in the first place. Draco was able to walk, but he could do so only painfully and slowly, and was reduced to muttering creative obscenities nonstop within the first ten minutes.

Once they'd finally made it back, Draco sat down on the bed, yanked off his singed robes, and started to pull off the shirt he wore beneath, but he stopped with a hiss of pain. "Damn," he managed. "I think it's stuck."

There was a long pause, and then Harry realized Ron was shifting from foot to foot and looking at the two of them. "I'll help?" Harry managed, in a questioning sort of voice. "We should be able to just disintegrate it or something. I didn't realize you'd been—did it burn you?"

There was another awkward silence, finally broken by Draco, who said irritably, "Stop looking at me like that. I'm not in danger, I'm just in pain. I need to get my fucking shirt off and put some ointment on it. If neither of you wants to help with that, then get out and let me do it myself."

Something spiked through Harry, and, for a moment, he almost felt a sense of vertigo. He should just take Ron and go, let Draco have a little privacy. But Draco looked both angry and lonely, and Harry felt abruptly guilty and—something else. There was another something boiling up in his stomach, and he didn't have time to figure it out right now. "I'll help," he said, after a moment. "Ron, can you go and see about getting us dinner or something?"

Ron frowned, looking as if he was about to object, and then sighed and nodded. "Yeah, sure, mate." He paused at the door, hovering, and then blurted, "Thanks, Draco," before leaving quickly.

Taking a deep breath, Harry turned back to Draco. "Right, let's get a look at your back," he said.

The expression on Draco's face was—odd. Stone-faced, almost belligerent, he seemed to be glaring at Harry, but when Harry got closer, he realized that his friend was actually trembling slightly. "Right," Harry said again. "Hold still, don't want to jinx you by accident." He took out his wand and seated himself gingerly on the bed beside Draco. " _Evanesco_ ," he murmured, carefully tucking his wand beneath Draco's collar, where it should have little chance of vanishing anything unfortunate. Normally, the Vanishing Spell was instantaneous, but for some odd reason, the shirt seemed to fade for a moment instead of just blinking out of existence. "Let me see your back."

Draco slid around on the bed. "It stings a bit, but I've had worse," he said, in a flat tone of voice that told Harry not to inquire further. Harry peered at the back that was presented to him. At first glance, it looked bruised, but something about the darkening coloration was off, and he frowned. Definitely wouldn't do to just leave this injury alone.

"You said you had an ointment, right?"

Nodding stiffly, Draco started to lean over to where he'd left his pack, but he stopped with a curse. "Can you get it?"

"Yeah, of course. Are you sure that's all you're going to need?"

"I've had a lot of exposure to ancient dark magic," Draco replied. "Yes. I will be fine, but I would rather you help me with the healing ointment than dither over whether I will need anything extra."

"Sorry." Harry felt his ears heating up as he ducked down to snag the pack and started rifling through it.

"It's in the purple bottle," Draco informed him, just as he found a number of potions that he would otherwise have had no way to identify. He grabbed the purple bottle and let the pack drop to the bed as he turned back to Draco.

He hadn't realized that Draco was so skinny. Robes weren't exactly a revealing kind of outfit; like this, in just his trousers and nothing else, Draco's ribs and knobby spine were clearly visible, and his shoulder blades were pointier than Harry might have liked. Awkwardly, Harry popped the seal on the purple bottle with a quick, silent spell, and let the fluid inside spill out across his hand. It was clear, with a faint pink tinge, a vaguely floral scent he couldn't quite place, and it made his fingers tingle ever-so-slightly.

Draco shivered as Harry carefully began to rub the ointment into his skin, and Harry tried to be gentler. The ugly dark color faded into a bruised yellow-green where the ointment had touched, but the tension in Draco's back hadn't eased; if anything, it had gotten worse at Harry's hesitant ministrations. "Is it helping?" he asked.

There was a moment of silence, and then a sudden intake of breath. "Oh—yeah, thanks," Draco said, almost vacantly, and he turned to Harry with an expression that it took Harry's brain several seconds to parse as an attempt at a smile.

"You don't look like it's helping."

"I don't like feeling vulnerable," Draco snapped. "Look, Potter, I can take it from here, all right? I'll just bandage it up, the ointment will work, and I'll be fine in twelve to seventy-two hours, depending."

There was still something here Harry wasn't getting. It was that same weird distance that always seemed to grow up between him and Draco whenever they were getting—well, _close_. "I can bandage it up," he offered. "It's probably easier for me. Look, if there's something else wrong—I mean, you know I'm absolute rubbish at the feelings thing, but I'd like to help. We're friends?" He hadn't intended the last to be a question, but it seemed to have come out that way anyway.

Draco took a long, deep breath. "Merlin, Harry, I—"

"Just tell me, I can't help if I don't know what's wrong." Ten years ago, if anyone'd told him he'd be saying this to Draco Malfoy—to a half-naked Draco Malfoy, some small part of his brain noted, oddly gleeful—he'd have laughed in their face. He hesitated a moment, then put a shaky hand on Draco's shoulder.

"Oh, for fuck's sake." Draco twisted round on the bed, and his hand came up. For a moment, Harry thought he was about to be punched, and then Draco grabbed the back of his head, pulled him forward, and kissed him soundly on the lips.

Harry made a strangled noise, as a number of things abruptly made sense to him, and then he leaned into the kiss. Things were just starting to get interesting when Draco pulled back sharply and stared at him. "Sorry, Potter," he said stiffly.

"Sorry?" Harry echoed, in confusion, and one of Draco's eyebrows climbed into his hair.

"Unless I—shouldn't be?" he asked cautiously.

Flushing, Harry's eyes flickered down across Draco's naked upper torso. "Yeah, let's go with that one," he said, and pinned Draco to the bed.

* * *

Frowning, Ral watched as the ink traced another blurry blue line on the parchment by itself, as it paused and a blot formed. "Now she's somewhere on the fourth floor," he sighed in exasperation. "I don't get it." With Teysa's apparently encyclopedic knowledge of spells to help them, he and Chandra had set up a tracing spell on Emmara that ought to be all but imperceptible. So far, she certainly hadn't given any indication that she knew they'd cast it, at least, but the results were—peculiar.

For the past few days, every evening, she'd left the common room at about the same time and gone somewhere completely innocuous, as far as they could tell. Every day, Ral, Teysa, and Chandra had waited until she'd left, gone to where the spell had indicated, and found themselves wandering around in the middle of an empty corridor somewhere in the middle of the castle. It didn't make any sense.

"We must be missing something." Teysa leaned over his shoulder and stared at the dot. "Either she's disrupting our spell, or she's somehow hiding wherever it is she's actually going."

"This needs to stop taking so long," Ral growled. "The longer it takes, the more Jace—"

"And Nissa and Elspeth still aren't waking up," Chandra put in. "You're right, we need to speed things up somehow."

"We need help," Ral said grimly. "We need something she won't expect. Something she can't guard against."

"But we don't know anything about her motivations," Teysa objected. "How can we predict what she will and won't expect? She's in the position of power here."

Ral threw himself backward in his chair so hard that he nearly overturned it. "I know," he groaned. "God, this is almost as bad as what happened first year! Actually, it might be worse, at least Mirko wasn't really doing it on purpose."

"Who's Mirko?" Teysa asked.

"Mirko is a boggart," Ral answered automatically. "They live in the Forbidden Forest, but they're usually around for things like Halloween. Wasn't Narset going to do an independent study on communicating with them?" He looked at Chandra.

"I think she did some last year, but she's been really busy this year."

" _Talking_ to a _boggart_?" Teysa sounded incredulous. "A mindless fear spirit? How?"

Ral waved a hand. "Mirko, uh, isn't really mindless. It turns out if a boggart is old enough, they can get pretty smart, and if you happen to let them share a mind with a powerful _legilimens_ , they can become almost human."

"A boggart. A _smart_ boggart." Teysa smiled suddenly. "I can't imagine _anyone_ would expect that."

Tilting his head to one side, Ral considered this. "Yeah," he said slowly. "Yeah, I think you're right. They're pretty good at hiding themself, too, so they could just follow her—all we need is a way to _tell_ them all this."

"I can ask Narset," Chandra offered. "Didn't she say something about using a pensieve?"

"Yeah." Ral tapped his quill against his chin. "It makes sense, and I think it's what Professor Granger did back in first year."

"Then we just have to get hold of a pensieve somehow," Teysa frowned.

"Professor Potter has one, he used it for Jace's lessons sometimes." Ral kicked at the desk. "But he's not _here_ , and he wouldn't listen if we asked to borrow it anyway."

"Who said anything about asking?" Chandra grinned. "No one would expect us to break into his rooms, so it'll be easy."

"That's certainly one way of looking at it." Teysa's eyebrows went up, but she didn't sound terribly perturbed.

"Right," said Ral, pleased to have a plan that might actually end in them being able to save Jace from whatever-the-fuck Emmara was doing to him. "Chandra can get the pensieve, and I'll get Mirko. They like me."

"And I'll stay here and keep an eye on the tracking spell," Teysa agreed, flashing him a bright smile.

"We've fucking _got_ this!" Chandra chimed in excitedly.

* * *

"What the _fuck_?"

"Ron, it's not—okay, so it's exactly what it looks like." Harry sat up hurriedly and then realized that he might be showing a bit too much skin. Beside him, Draco frantically grabbed for a shirt.

"Dammit, Weasley, you could have knocked!" he snarled angrily.

"Sorry I wasn't expecting my best mate to be fucking a Death Eating poofter!" Ron snarled back, and Harry felt Draco, beside him, go very still.

"Ron, I don't want to hear this," he cut in, and Ron shut his eyes and took an explosively deep breath.

"Sorry," he forced out. "I just need—I'm going to go get a drink. I got us some Muggle food for dinner, chow down." He dropped a paper bag on the bed and backed out of the room, shutting the door behind him. Harry looked awkwardly over at Draco, scratching the back of his head.

"Sorry, that kind of killed the mood, didn't it?"

"No, no, I enjoy it when the tail end of my lovemaking is accompanied by my lover's friend walking in and reminding me of all the reasons a relationship is impossible," Draco retorted caustically. He still hadn't managed to find a shirt—probably, Harry realized, as the endorphins started to clear up, because Harry had vanished the one he'd been wearing before all this started.

"What d'you mean?" he asked with a frown. Okay, they hadn't so much talked about this thing, more just fallen into bed, but he'd assumed if they were both on board with it, it wasn't just going to be a one night stand. He didn't _want_ it to be a one night stand.

"Potter, really? Must I give you a lesson on exactly how impossible it is for the two of us to be—"

"—friends?" Harry cut in. "Because that seemed pretty fucking impossible a few years ago."

"You know that isn't what I was going to say." But Draco was starting to look rather nonplussed.

"I just think you're panicking," Harry shrugged. "Ron came in at a bad time and was a twat. That doesn't mean he's right."

Apparently giving up on the shirt, Draco sighed and sat back against the pillows. "Look, Potter, have you ever had a boyfriend?"

Harry blinked at him. "Uh, yeah."

"Then you won't—wait, what?"

"Oh sorry, did I derail your angstfest? I already had my bisexual awakening, Malfoy. After Ginny and I broke up, I dated a Muggle named Stephen for about a year. Didn't really work out, mostly because I couldn't tell him a lot of stuff about my personal life, but it was fine. It ended with less drama than the thing with Ginny, even."

"You— _Harry Potter_ , the Boy Who Lived, Savior of the Wizarding World—dated a man—a _Muggle_ man, and it never made the tabloids?"

"Er, yeah, we were pretty discreet. Besides, no one expects Harry-Potter-the-Boy-Who-Lived-Savior-of-the-Wizarding-World to be dating a Muggle. Maybe we were just lucky."

"Well." Malfoy stared and sat back. "Hm."

"I mean," Harry said, in an effort to be fair. "Muggle culture tends to be more accepting of the whole, y'know, being gay thing. Still not fantastic, mind you, but definitely better."

"There is also the slight matter of me being an ex Death-Eater," Malfoy said cautiously, but the spark of bitter anger seemed to have died away.

"Yeah, well, it doesn't bother me—not anymore—and I think that's pretty much the most important thing," Harry shrugged. "Don't you?"

Though his expression was still guarded, Draco's body was slowly relaxing. "I suppose that's a not unreasonable way of looking at it," he said stiffly.

"Okay, good then," Harry said with a smile. "And maybe now would be a good time to eat." He indicated the bag Ron had left on the bed. "When you dive in front of a curse for your _boyfriend_ you tend to need to eat some food so your body heals up quicker, yeah?"

A slow flush was building across Draco's pale face. "I—I suppose so," he managed, and there was a smile twisting at the corner of his mouth.


	11. Bitterheart Witch

The smell of old books was oddly soporific, as Hermione struggled to keep her eyes open. She felt as if they must have gone through every volume in the Restricted Section by now, but they still hadn't found anything about sailboats. Not that it could actually be about sailboats, of course, but whatever it was, they still hadn't found it yet.

Sighing, she shifted position, and her knuckles brushed against Luna's. Luna looked up from her position crouched in front of the shelves, smiled brilliantly, and leaned over to brush her lips across Hermione's cheek. Hermione flushed and looked away, but she was smiling. Squeezing Luna's hand, she leaned forward, trying to conceal the fact that her throat felt strangely tight.

Aimlessly, she reached for a large, solid book on the bottom shelf, let it tip forward into her lap, and stared at it. _Saelanunge Gerecednessa_. Old English. It took a moment for Hermione to parse it; although she had taken several classes in it because there were some spells—especially very old spells—that were not Latinate in origin. They tended to be less well known and therefore an excellent trick to have up one's sleeve. Besides which, she'd been curious.

 _Tales of Binding_.

"That's it." Luna was leaning over her shoulder; her breasts against Hermione's back were almost inexpressibly soft, and it took Hermione far too long to succeed in parsing what she'd said. She automatically followed Luna's gaze towards the intricate Celtic knot on the front cover of the book. "What?"

"Sailboats. I can't believe it. I mean, I suppose I can see how my brain made the connection, but it's still rather funny, isn't it? Do you know what it means?"

"Tales of Binding," Hermione supplied. "Wait, you mean this is _the_ book?"

"Let me see it." Luna flipped it open, and, unusually cooperatively for a Restricted Section book, it lay quiescent as she turned page after yellowing page. "Yes," she breathed, after a moment. "Yes, yes— _this_. Here." Triumphantly, she pointed to an illustration with what looked like a coffee-cup stain in the corner. It was one of those sort of woodcut-esque drawings, with a lot of diagonal lines for shading that made the ring of dark stones stand out darkly from the page. "This is what I found," Luna said with a shudder.

Hermione squinted at the crabbed handwriting on the obverse page, trying to make it out. Poor handwriting and a language she wasn't used to reading. "This is going to take a while to transcribe," she frowned. "And I need some better lighting."

By the flickering torchlight deep in the Reserved Section, she could barely make out the letters.

"Why don't we go to the lounge?" Luna suggested. "Once we've translated it, we can tell Harry and Draco what they're looking for."

Hermione nodded. "The last I heard, they were still poking around the general area and hadn't found anything, but it's been quite some time since they last reported to us." She frowned. "I hope they're all right," she said quietly.

Luna put a comforting hand on her arm. "I'm sure they are. Harry can be a little scatterbrained at times." She tipped her head to the side in a smile. Hermione smiled back as she picked up _Tales of Binding_ and got to her feet.

* * *

Teysa refused to tell them how she'd gotten into Professor Potter's office, which made Ral suspect whatever she'd done was probably illegal and therefore fascinating, but either way, she and Ral had gotten back at roughly the same time, and all Ral had had to do was bum around the Forbidden Forest until Mirko showed up. Which hadn't taken long. He thought the boggart got lonely out there sometimes, and he felt bad that he hadn't visited them this year, but with everything that was going on with Jace, he just hadn't felt up to it.

Without a way to talk to them—without Jace, he admitted grudgingly—it was harder to know if Mirko would understand what he wanted. There was just the chill of their breath and the sense of uneasiness they always brought. The blurred grey figure rising from the mist shimmered and took on Jace's form—something Mirko was always pretty comfortable with, ever since their first year—and Ral had to suppress a sudden stabbing pain in his throat.

Mirko's eyes, blank and blue and just too large for the real Jace, stared implacably at Ral for a long moment, and then they held out one pale, misty hand in the direction of Hogwarts. _Let's go_ , they seemed to be saying. The journey back was short but silent, awkward because Ral didn't think he'd ever been alone with Mirko before.

Talking to them via the pensieve instead of directly through Jace's mind was more difficult, and made Ral think vaguely of the _His Dark Materials_ trilogy. The way disjointed images and symbols bubbled to the surface for interpretation was similar to the way he'd always imagined Lyra reading the alethiometer. Except that none of the three of them had an innate talent for it, because the person who had the innate talent for talking to Mirko was the person they were trying to rescue.

Eventually, though, Mirko had nodded, which probably meant they understood what Ral, Teysa, and Chandra were trying to tell them, and faded out into a grayish mist that trickled out the door. Good timing, too, because this was generally around the time that Emmara showed up somewhere vaguely on the fourth floor and then vanished.

Ral was now sort of trying to focus on homework, and pretty much failing—this essay was going to be incomprehensible even by his usual standards—while Chandra wasn't bothering to even try, and was, instead, amusing herself by trying to make what looked like fire rings in the air. Teysa, apparently more patient than either of them, was calmly ensconced in a book nearly as large as she was.

Several minutes later, the grey mist boiled up again from underneath the door and formed into a pillar, which rapidly became a vaguely Jace-esque figure again. It was smiling, which Ral cautiously took to be a good sign. Mirko wasn't _great_ at human facial expressions, but they usually weren't totally off either. A smile was probably some kind of positive.

Mirko floated over to the pensieve, and Teysa, Ral, and Chandra crowded eagerly around it. "Don't elbow me," Ral said irritably.

"Then let me _see_ ," Chandra responded, but both of them fell silent as the images began to form.

It was the fourth floor, all right, built in miniature silver in the bowl in front of them. Dim, shadowy figures moved through it, and Ral watched intently for Emmara, though he wasn't certain he'd be able to recognize her at this level of resolution. Slowly, the picture panned along an empty stretch of wall between two pictures. Instead of continuing, as Ral had expected, it paused. Then the silver bricks of the wall seemed to slide backwards like so many Tetris blocks, revealing a sturdy wooden door with an ornate handle that, for some reason, looked very vaguely familiar.

"But that door doesn't exist," Chandra pointed out, in a puzzled tone of voice. "What're they trying to tell us?"

Ral frowned. "It looks familiar," he said. "But I think you're right, isn't there just wall there? Mirko, are you sure this thing is doing what you want it to?"

The blurred pale face turned slowly from the pensieve and then back to Ral, and the boggart gave a single, deep nod.

"Maybe you're wrong?" Teysa suggested. "Perhaps it's a hidden door—it could be concealed by an illusion, or even something as simple as a tapestry."

"I guess…" Ral said doubtfully. That didn't seem likely, but he supposed it was possible. "We might as well go look for it."

"Yeah," Chandra agreed. "Look, if she's as powerful as you think she is, maybe she, I don't know, created a new door or something, and then hid it."

Ral considered this. It seemed like you'd have to go to an awful lot of trouble to do something like that without the staff finding out. On second thought, absolutely no one had noticed or believed him about what she'd done to Jace, so maybe it wasn't so unbelievable after all. "Yeah, let's go," he agreed.

The three of them made their way up silently to the fourth floor corridor. Ral was shaking with suppressed nerves, and every so often, a tiny spark formed on his pinky finger and shot towards the ground. _All I want to do,_ he thought angrily, _is find out what she's doing and stop her. And maybe get a thank you from Jace. A thank you would be nice._

Or maybe—maybe he could get Jace to look at him the way he'd looked during the few hours they'd worked together in the lab a week ago, that soft, almost hesitant look and the way Jace's mouth suddenly turned up into an excited grin, the way his lips—fuck. _I am not in love with my best friend_.

Whatever. It didn't matter. He just had to get to get him back. Help him. That was the only thing that was important right now, find out what Emmara had been doing to him and how they could fix it.

He barely noticed the stairs going past and was almost surprised when they reached the stretch of wall that Mirko had indicated. Unsurprisingly, it was blank. Ral sighed. Now they had to figure out how to find the door the boggart had showed them—but Mirko was continuing past the wall for some reason. "Uh, hey, Mirko?" Ral said uncertainly. "Wasn't it here?"

The blurred Jace-head swiveled a disconcertingly large angle around and nodded. Simultaneously, Mirko raised one backwards hand and beckoned at them. This was weird, but the boggart was still the best lead they had, so, with a shrug, Ral followed them. They got to the end of the passage and turned back. "Seriously, what're they _doing_?" Chandra hissed as they followed it right back down the corridor again.

"Be patient," Teysa said crisply. "Quite a number of spells require repetition."

Chandra made a grumbling noise, but subsided. Ral would have liked to complain as well, too nervous and on-edge to want to just keep walking aimlessly back and forth, but he wasn't going to say anything after Chandra already had.

Reaching the other end of the hallway and turning around again, they walked back yet again—and then Mirko stopped in front of that same damn patch of wall. Except somehow it wasn't empty anymore. Ral blinked. Teysa had been right. Instead of the same boring, uniform paneling between two large portraits, there was now a door slotted snugly into the wall, the same door they'd seen in the pensieve, the same door that seemed so oddly familiar to Ral, if he could only place it.

But this was it. This was the closest they'd been yet. With a sense of mounting triumph, Ral reached out and tried the doorknob. There was a soft creak, and then it swung inward.

* * *

Things were awkward again. The previous night, Ron had apologized as stiffly as humanly possible to both of them, staring at something over Harry's left ear when he did, and curling up in his sleeping bag on the floor with his back pressed against the wall.

"Oh, for Merlin's sake," Draco said loudly. "Weasley, I wouldn't want your arse if it was the last arse in the bloody universe, all right?"

Ron went red to his ears and glared, but he eased away from the wall a little. By the following day, he was at least back to making eye contact with Harry, although Harry noticed that he still stayed maybe an arms' length farther away than he normally did. But if this was his rate of getting okay with the situation, as long as it kept up, it wouldn't be that bad, Harry supposed. In a month or two, things might even be back to normal again.

They had waited until the afternoon to go back to the stones they'd found, mostly because Draco was still moving stiffly and a little painfully in the morning, and Harry didn't want him to strain himself, so he'd contrived to think up a lot of small excuses to keep them around the bedroom until it was relatively late. He wasn't sure if Draco had tumbled to his game or not; Ron certainly hadn't and was just getting more and more impatient.

Now, though, they were heading up the old tor for the second time. There was still a chilly dankness settled across it, at stark odds with what was actually a surprisingly sunny day. "Why don't you let me do the spells this time, Potter?" Draco suggested acerbically.

"You can probably call me Harry," Harry pointed out mildly. "You were certainly yelling it loud enough yesterday."

There was a sudden silence, and Harry watched in amusement as both Ron and Draco slowly turned red.

"Harry then," Draco said shortly, digging his wand out of his robes. "Either way, I don't need you setting off another ancient curse and getting us all incinerated or turned into frogs or something equally nasty."

His approach was similar to what Harry's had been on the previous day, except that he threw in one or two charms in what Harry thought was probably Gaelic, but the rapidity of his speech and the harshness of his accent made it difficult to tell. Harry had never had much experience with Gaelic anyways.

He could still sense the darkness in the air, and the sensation actually grew worse as Draco carefully moved from spell to spell, until finally, he paused with a sigh. "Of course," he said.

"What is it?" Ron asked.

"The spell Harry tripped yesterday seems to have been the last protection round this place. Now there are just traces."

Taking out his wand, Harry quickly performed his own spell, the spell that had ended so disastrously on the previous day. "You're right," he said. "Just traces of dark magic. But some of it's recent—well, relatively recent." And he thought he recognized the signature, too, though it would have to be a good decade old or so.

"Some is very old, though." Draco frowned. "There's something familiar about it."

"I think some of the newer stuff may have been Bellatrix Lestrange," Harry said, and Draco nodded slowly.

"It's her style, all right. A large amount of power pumped through to break an ancient spell. Very careless. And I think at least one person died here then, though I can't be certain. Not on land with a dark spell this old on it—it's soaked into the bones of the place."

Frowning, Draco chewed on his knuckle. "So, suppose this place was raided by Voldemort's lackeys during the war. The spell was broken, and something was taken out of the earth—perhaps an artifact?"

"They could have been doing so many things," Harry shrugged. "I'm sure there are still Death-Eaters walking around free."

Draco gave him a sardonic smile. "Some people would say there was one right here."

He glanced in Ron's direction, but Ron didn't exactly rise to the bait. "So you don't know what it was, then, mate?"

"I don't know what it was, but if you just give me a minute—I could swear I've seen something like this before. Ugh, it's a pity we don't have a pensieve."

"We could go back to Hogwarts," Harry pointed out.

"No—I don't think it's actually necessary." Draco frowned, then snapped his fingers. "I've got it. Father once took me to one of Voldemort's boltholes in France—"

"Oh, _those_." Harry blew out an explosive breath. In the years following the war, they'd discovered that, although most of Voldemort's followers were British, he had several strongholds in other countries; the most numerous, of course, being directly across the Channel.

"They had someone imprisoned there," Draco said slowly. "She was under heavy guard, and I wasn't allowed to get very close. All Father said was that she had the potential to be a powerful ally if she could be convinced to aid us."

"I take it she wasn't convinced," Harry said dryly, "or we'd know a bit more about what was going on right now. Maybe we'd better look into this French bolthole, then."

"I'd love to, but I don't exactly have my passport on me," Draco responded, with a frustrated sigh.

"Well, then," Ron broke in. "Good thing you've got a practicing Auror with you, isn't it?" He gave them a grim smile as they turned to him. "This is definitely enough proof to constitute at least a minor emergency. I can get us in through the international floo network."

* * *

 _The Sleeper in Stone,_ Hermione read slowly, paying little attention to the cup of tea at her elbow, and just a bit more to Luna's hand, brushing lightly against her knuckles. Even tucked into a large number of blankets in her own room, curled up against her new girlfriend, and with a steaming cup of tea that smelled lovely, she was shivering, tired, and apprehensive. And _Tales of Binding_ wasn't exactly easy reading material. Hermione's Gaelic was rusty, and the handwriting was scrawled and hasty, which, combined with a relatively odd word-choice and the author's evident _desire_ to be poetic but lack of particular _talent_ , made it really difficult going.

 _Upon then through darkness blinding spake Merlin_ —she had to be translating some of that wrong, but never mind, Hermione thought with a shake of her head.

 _You viper, you whom I held to my breast_

 _Who has poisoned my veins in my sleep_

 _A rose with too-hidden thorn_

 _Now shall you too sleep._

 _Too long your honeyed words have lulled me_

 _The stinking rot of your false love_

 _Clouding my mind with a miasma._

 _Kill you I cannot, but sleep you shall._

"Are you sure it's 'miasma'?" Luna ventured. "Or, well, maybe you're right, but what do you think the author means by that?"

Hermione frowned at the page. "It looks like he's talking about a love potion," she pointed out. "Smell's a pretty good indicator, and that would definitely cloud your thoughts. A love potion that affected Merlin himself would have to be pretty strong, though."

"Well, there are all those stories about Nimue," Luna said dreamily. "My da used to read me some of them when I was little."

"Most wizards don't think they have much truth to them." Hermione shifted, frowning. "But then, I suppose we don't know how accurate this story is either."

Luna ran her fingers across the image of the standing stones opposite to the text. "This is what I saw, though," she murmured. "The earth was churned up, but the ring of stones was just the same."

"Hmmm." It was still difficult to think beneath the haze of exhaustion—Hermione wondered if she was getting sick. But something was niggling at her. "Did they _have_ love potions in Merlin's time?" There had been charms, she was sure of that. But, frustratingly—and she ought to _know_ this, she was teaching History of Magic, for Merlin's sake—she couldn't quite put her finger on the appropriate range of dates for the first love potions.

" _Accio Weatherby_ ," she murmured, summoning his treatise, _Mind-altering Magic Through the Ages_. It was a good reference volume that wasn't so in-depth she thought she'd have trouble finding what she needed. "Hmmm. It looks as if they did. Liliana Vess is older than I thought she was."

"Liliana Vess?"

"Supposedly the inventor of the first love potion. Not much is known about her other than old stories. We don't even really have reliable dates for her. She could have overlapped Merlin; she could also have been a few centuries earlier." Hermione shook her head. There was simply no reason that the history of this era should be so sporadic. Perhaps everyone had been busy hiding from Muggles, she thought exasperatedly, although that really didn't explain much. Well, history of magic wasn't _really_ her area of expertise; it was just where she was most needed as a teacher.

The fire flared green, startling Hermione out of her reverie.

"Hermione." Harry's head looked grim. "We've got a situation."

"You found the stones?"

"Oh, yeah, we found them. Draco followed the dark magic trace there and brought us to France—by the way, that's why I didn't just floo back entirely, we're still here—and to one of Voldemort's old hideaways. He says there was someone kept here during the war, someone Voldemort was hoping to convince to fight on his side."

Hermione's stomach was suddenly queasy. "Not someone we'd have wanted fighting on his side, I take it?"

"No," Harry said shortly. "Whoever she is, she's a bloody dark witch. And we found the spot—took us long enough, there was an absolute maze of befuddlement charms around it. We finally managed to track down one of the locals—a squib—who remembered a tour group that came through quite late one night and went right into what everyone thought were abandoned ruins. He remembered that there was a woman with white hair and a boy with a blue cloak who went in. He thinks they came out escorting another young woman."

"Oh no," Hermione whispered.

* * *

The room Ral, Teysa, and Chandra had entered looked like an alchemical laboratory, complete with several heavy oaken cabinets, and a huge iron cauldron that looked as if it was probably big enough to fit a person. Teysa had immediately limped over to it and looked inside before pronouncing that it was empty, somewhat to Ral's relief. Something about the hulking sides and the weird, knotted designs on its side turned his stomach. In fact, the whole room felt— _dark_. There was a strange dimness hanging over everything.

"Somebody's been doing dark magic in here," Teysa said, sounding slightly uneasy.

"How do you know?" Ral asked, even though the hair was prickling at the back of his neck.

"I know what it feels like." Teysa pursed her lips together, one hand clenching in the robes over her injured leg. "Let's check around for any clues in the cabinets and then leave. I'd rather not stay here any longer than I have to."

The first cabinet wouldn't open, not even to _alohomora_. Teysa warned them away from the second one. "We can come back later, but I want to have a good anti-curse book right at hand before we try anything with that." She jabbed a finger at the complex rune inscribed across the front of the second cabinet. "That could be very nasty if we aren't very careful."

The third cabinet, however, was less carefully sealed. The door shuddered and creaked when Ral cast the unlocking charm on it, though it didn't quite open.

"The hinges," Teysa said suddenly, narrowing her eyes. "They're not properly reinforced. We can probably just destroy them, if we can—"

" _Incendio_." A cylinder of flame blossomed from the end of Chandra's wand, and Ral felt the heat of it on his arm as it went past. The hinges tried to maintain cohesion, but they were old and poorly made, and apparently Chandra's fire was _very_ hot.

"Nice," Ral said appreciatively as the metal glowed red, then white, and then finally melted, trickling down the side of the apparently magically-protected wood. That probably didn't make sense, and somewhere in a side corner of his brain, Ral made a note to look more carefully into fire protection spells and how they interacted with normal critical points. Were there magical phase transitions in addition to the normal ones?

And then the front of the cabinet was sagging off, and all thoughts of science were forgotten, because—"Oh my god. _Kallist_."

What had she _done_ to him? The little cloud hung in the center of the ruined cabinet, nothing more than a puff of eerily unmoving grey mist. Hands shaking, Ral reached into the cabinet and gently prodded the cloud. It felt cold and oddly dry to the touch; his finger passed through it without any noticeable effect. "Kallist, mate, c'mon," he murmured. "Can you hear me?"

No response. Sickness churned in Ral's stomach, the way it had last summer when Niv had gotten into Ral's dad's chocolate stash. But he'd been okay, they'd taken him to the vet—there weren't any vets for clouds, Ral thought stupidly. Carefully, he got out his wand and looked from it to Kallist. Would conjuring a spark help?

A cold presence at his elbow drew his attention back to Mirko, who was staring into the cabinet as well. Maybe he'd know what to do—they were both amortals, after all, so he'd have a better chance of knowing something useful than Ral would. Or maybe—he didn't want to get one of the professors, but Tamiyo at least should have a better grasp than Ral himself did. Chewing on his lip, he tried to decide if it made more sense to leave for now and come back, or to stay and try to solve it themselves. He hated to ask for help, and he hated the idea of leaving—they might not be able to find it again easily—but Kallist was too important to gamble the wrong way on. So was Jace.

"Hey, Teysa—" She'd have a better feel for this than Chandra would, probably.

" _Riddikulus!_ " There was a sudden, sharp crack, and Mirko gave a sudden croaking, screaming cry. As Ral whirled with his wand in his hand, the boggart exploded into a handful of wisps of grey mist, which dissipated into the surrounding air. Maybe it was the sudden dull thump of pain at the sight of his friend imploding, but whatever it was, when he tried to bring his wand to bear, he was just a moment too late to avoid it when the second voice shouted, " _Expelliarmus_!"

Ral's wand went flying out of his hand amid an explosion of sparks. He twisted around, trying to recover it, but it clattered to the floor halfway across the room.

" _Incendi_ —" Chandra's voice was arrested in the middle of the spell she was trying to cast, and Ral turned around and then dove to the side to avoid a red bolt as someone yelled, " _Stupefy!_ "

He hit the ground hard and rolled, scrambling to the other side of the cabinet he'd found Kallist in. His wand was only a few feet away from him, if he could just—

A foot came down on top of it, and Ral found himself staring at Jace as the latter bent and retrieved his wand.

"Jace, what the fuck are you doing?"

His friend stared at him and seemed to look right through him, a wide, dizzy smile plastered across his face. He raised his wand. "Don't move," he said. "Emmara?"

She came around the side of the cabinet, barely even a hair out of place.

"Well, whatever shall we do with you, hm, Ral Zarek?" The stupid-sounding French accent was gone, replaced by a different lilt that sounded almost like Elspeth's. Not quite. "I'm very tired of you causing me this much trouble all the time."

"Jace," Ral said steadily, ignoring her. "Give me back my wand."

The blue eyes blinked very slowly. "I don't think I should," Jace said finally, his voice sounding as if it was drenched in molasses. Emmara shot him an irritated look.

"Oh, be quiet, Jace," she said, and Jace shut his mouth immediately. "That's a darling boy," she continued, and he smiled dreamily.

"What did you do to him?" Ral snarled, starting forward. Fuck it, he didn't need a wand, he'd punch that smug grin right off her face. He felt something sizzling in the air around his fist, forming a tight corona that set the hair on the back of his wrist rising—

Emmara snarled something in a language he didn't recognize, and something hit Ral very hard in the region of his chest. He doubled over, gasping, but his lungs couldn't seem to get any air.

"You're just aching for a lesson, aren't you, boy?" Something sharp beneath his chin forced his head up.

"Jace—won't let you—do anything to me," Ral forced out through painfully constricted lungs.

"Your precious Jace is so full of _Amortentia_ that his heart would give out if he had another drop," Emmara responded, her eyes glittering darkly. "He won't do a damn thing for you. And when it's over, I'll tell him to erase the memory, so he doesn't have to dream of you screaming until your lungs run out of air."

"You fucking _bitch_ —" Tingling surged up his arm, and he could feel it trying to break loose, but before it could, the wand jerked up beneath his throat.

" _Crucio_."


	12. Reforge the Soul

Emmara was the most beautiful thing Jace had ever seen in his life. Her hair fluttered slightly, glowing in the flickering light of the active spell. Her bright blue eyes were like twin jewels, and her smile— _why is she smiling like that_?—was a sweet, full grin, lips drawn back to display her teeth. _Someone's screaming. Someone's hurt_.

She'd told him he could help her. If he helped her, she'd let him stay by her side forever, and that was the only thing he wanted. Just to help her and to be allowed to hold her and look at her lovely form, the curve of her hips and breasts, the tightness of her hand holding her wand. _They're still screaming_. The voice sounded familiar.

 _Something's wrong_. Jace's head hurt. Emmara had said to wait patiently and help, but his head hurt. Flashes of pain like little lightning bolts kept jabbing into his skull. _He's hurt. Don't hurt him. Stop_. Wincing, Jace put a hand to his head. Emmara had told him not to worry. So he shouldn't worry. There wasn't anything to worry about. _Yes, there is, you idiot! That's Ral! Ral's hurt!_

Of course it was Ral. He'd been in Ral's head more than he'd been in anyone else's. He'd recognize Ral's thoughts anywhere. _Jace won't let you do anything to me._ His mind pulled the statement, and somewhere inside he realized that it had been a long, long moment since it had been spoken. _Ral is screaming._

Emmara's wand was pointed at Ral. Ral was screaming. There was another thought in there, the middle thought, the second out of three thoughts in the logical progression, and it wasn't coming. Jace couldn't make it happen. He couldn't think it. That wasn't right. That was—oh Merlin—that was definitely not right.

He wanted to be calm—he was calm—but, Jace was suddenly convinced, he _shouldn't_ be calm. But he could use that. Since he was calm, he could easily focus inwards— _he's screaming Ral's screaming oh god oh Ral oh no—_ and look at his mental walls. No, he thought calmly, surveying them, he definitely should not be calm. There were holes everywhere—little ones, _tiny ones_ , but something pink was oozing or wafting through each and every single one, like a huge spiderweb crisscrossing through his mind.

All right. He needed to get rid of that. It shouldn't be too difficult now that he knew it was there, because thankfully Professor Potter had drilled him in all sorts of tricks for dealing with mental invasion. And he was so blissfully calm that it was _simple_ to do a quick check, find all of the holes, and simply shutter them closed all at once.

The pink threads snapped with a soft mental ping. _Emmara is hurting Ral_. There it was. There was the thought. And Jace wasn't calm at all, not anymore.

" _Stupefy_!" The word ripped from his throat before he even knew what spell he was casting. Emmara gasped and staggered forward, her own spell— _the Cruciatus curse_ —snapping as her wand arm fell.

"Jace, what are you doing?" she panted, somehow still upright and beginning to raise her wand again. "You can't possibly—"

 _"_ _Stupefy_!" he tried again, but this time, impossibly, she turned it aside with a complex wand movement.

"You stupid boy!" she snarled. "How did you shake off that much _Amortentia_? Oh, never mind. _Cullah_."

The last word coincided with a sudden blue light emanating from the end of her wand. Jace, finding reflexes he hadn't known he possessed, just barely managed to throw himself out of the way before it caught him. But before she could raise her wand to try again, he had his own up. " _Legilimens._ "

* * *

 _I won't go back to the earth_. _The cold place the damp the dark the rot worms crawling across flesh I won't go back and I won't die._

 _Yes, you will._ Her mental walls were strong, but they weren't strong enough. Not when all Jace could hear were Ral's screams echoing over and over and over again. One last burst of pain, and then the touch of Ral's mind was fading. It took him an instant to feel the shape of her thoughts, but it wasn't so long that he couldn't react to her next attempt.

" _Protego_!" Jace shouted at the same time as Emmara—and that wasn't her name, of course that wasn't her name—screamed out another spell. The shield charm reverberated with the impact, and he felt her mind reaching for another spell that would disintegrate it. From somewhere, he found a spell that let him detach the shield charm and briefly cast an invisibility spell. Hidden, he let her focus on disintegrating the shield as he concentrated on deepening the connection between them.

He winced as the shield went down, because the spell she had used was tailored to follow the spell back to the caster and—dragging the wand movements from her mind by main force, he was just barely able to stop the spellwyrm from getting to him, but he had to drop the invisibility to do so, and he looked up to find Liliana's eyes locking with his.

He felt the impulse in her mind, but this time wasn't quite fast enough to stop it.

 _"_ _Dorchadas_!"

Jace's vision went black, and now she thought she'd won, because it didn't matter what he was doing in there, he couldn't possibly stop her when he was _blind_ —

He'd practiced finding other minds a little, mostly with Ral, but the hard part wasn't really knowing they were there or finding them or getting in—it was staying afloat, staying _him_ amid the sudden sea of memories. _Legilimens_ protected you somehow, and following his blind, instinctive sense didn't, but Jace didn't know anything right now about who he was, and all he wanted was to see her _scream and bleed and writhe_

And it was so _easy_ to find someone else who wanted the _exact same thing_.

 _I'm Teysa yes I'm a squib yes I can still fuck you up_

 _Practicing in her room for hours, all the wand movements perfect, but still no response, still nothing nothing nothing_

 _We're disappointed in your progress_

 _The Dark Lord won't be pleased—have to hide her—keep her safe—_

 _Why would we want to keep her safe?_

 _She's our_ child _._

 _She's a mistake. A freak._

 _Us freaks have to stick together._

Teysa's point of view wasn't perfect, but she was happy to help, and she was used to looking at things from the wrong angle. She knew how to tell someone else to move. As the dark witch advanced on them, it was actually quite helpful to have a broader perspective on the scene. Jace alone might not have seen the cauldron, and he might have tripped over it. But Teysa saw it, and Teysa knew how to navigate when your footing wasn't secure— _too much dark magic near the delivery room or maybe a curse, we can't fix it, could also be why she can't use magic—_ and they danced to the side, easily evading the witch's spell.

Not _expelliarmus_ , the witch would probably expect that—but she couldn't cast spells if she couldn't use her arm, could she? They grinned, and _oh Merlin_ , the feeling of magic dancing, sparking through her veins for once was exhilarating, it was beautiful, it was _exactly_ what she'd imagined. They hesitated, one brief heartbeat of _but should we_? But sometimes you had to be vicious, and you had to hurt them before they could hurt you. Before they could hurt you _more_.

They hit the floor, rolled. It was dizzying to watch and feel, but it wasn't _so_ different from playing Ral's old video games, the controller vibrating in their hands. Just a little more disorientation, and they were used to being disoriented. " _Ossum ruptor_!"

It sounded like a piece of plastic snapping. The witch screamed, wand falling from her fingers without her control, and bounced to the ground. " _Petrificus totalus_!" And she was falling, frozen like she'd frozen Teysa, in front of Ral's limp, unconscious— _please be unconscious please he has to be unconscious_ —form.

She was sobbing and terrified, but they didn't care; they were raising their wand even as they advanced on her.

"Please—I don't want to die—Jace, please."

The streaks of white were widening in her now-dark hair, and she looked pitiful, scrunched onto the floor in a crouch, her big eyes red and puffy with age and tears. They didn't feel anything but a quiet nausea. This woman had violated Jace in every conceivable way—he couldn't even trust his own thoughts anymore. And she had made Ral scream; she had nearly killed Elspeth and Nissa, sucking out their life force to extend her own bloated, sickening existence. She was going to pay fot that. She was _going_ to—

Their wand arm wasn't even trembling as they raised it. " _Avada—"_

Jace's world flattened and then dissipated in a wash of bright light.


	13. Awakening

He was floating somewhere in a misty void, and there were voices whispering.

 _—wake up? Elspeth—_

 _—freak—_

 _—taxed himself to his limits—_

 _—won't die, Merlin, you'll see, I'll awaken however long it takes—_

 _—never seen anyone do anything like it—_

There were too many of them. He wanted to block his ears, but he couldn't feel his hands or his ears, so that was probably not going to work. How could he even find his own thoughts inside all of this mess? Even the little impulse that felt like him—whatever that even meant—felt as if it was about to break up into separate little fragments.

 _Please be quiet_ , he tried to say, but he didn't have any way to say it either. He wasn't really sure if there was anything he could do except float in the void and try to stop it from pulling him apart, but he was exhausted. He had a muted, fragmented feeling that he wasn't even sure if his thoughts could be trusted, and if he wasn't anything _but_ those thoughts anymore, maybe it would just be better for everyone if he gave up and let the voices be everything. It would certainly be a lot more restful.

 _Jace. Your name is Jace Beleren._

He didn't recognize that voice, although he felt as if he ought to.

 _Sleep, child. I'll keep the others out._

The buzzing voices went suddenly, blissfully silent, and Jace felt as if a cold mist was wrapping around him. Sleep sounded like a wonderful option, and he no longer felt as if it meant surrender to total nothingness.

 _Thank you_ , he whispered to the voice that he didn't recognize, and he slipped back downward into unconsciousness.

When he woke up again, Jace's mind felt bruised but significantly more normal. He could feel his limbs and the bed beneath him, which he counted as a success. He wasn't entirely sure he was capable of movement still, because there seemed to be a foggy disconnect between his awareness and his body, but at least he could feel it now. And at least his consciousness seemed to be in one piece.

He had a feeling something bad had happened, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. There was still a chilly touch in the back of his mind, as if someone had—

 _Get out!_ _Get OUT_! Someone was blocking off his access to part of his head, and Jace didn't know why, but he couldn't stand the feeling. He sat up, his stomach heaving, and he was vomiting over the side of the bed before he'd even really realized it.

The chilly touch withdrew almost immediately, and there were hands on his back, holding him steady.

"Steady now," said Professor Granger's calm voice.

The memories that had been blocked off surged to the forefront of Jace's mind, and he gagged again, bringing up more stinging bile. Ral screaming. Not being able to _think_. Emmara—no—Liliana—no—France was mostly a blur, but Jace thought the witch had either figured out pretty quickly what he could do, or she'd gotten him to her cottage specifically because she already knew about it. He had a hazy image of a newspaper article about himself, something about "breaking the bounds of the human mind" which had been a source of rather embarrassed pride for both him and Ranna when it came out, but he wasn't certain if the memory was connected to Liliana or not.

She'd definitely dosed him early on, because in almost all of his memories of her—in all the memories that must have been Liliana instead of Emmara—there was that same sort of incomprehensible hero worship. It wasn't that he would have done anything for her, not exactly—he hadn't been that mind-controlled, Jace thought miserably. No, she'd just—made him think she was beautiful. Gorgeous. Perfect. And then she'd let him do the rest.

Because he'd been afraid to lose her. And she'd made him think that he wasn't really worthy of her, but she was so kind, and if he just tried hard enough, she wouldn't leave him. So he'd used his _legilimency_ to trick the Sorting Hat, because she'd clung to him and said she was frightened of something intruding on her thoughts, and he remembered his own Sorting—and then he'd cut class to snog her, and he'd—and Ral had—

Oh, Merlin. Ral.

"Professor—is Ral—is he okay?"

There was a pause, and Jace's stomach prepared to void itself again.

"He's still asleep," Professor Granger said. "The healers are hopeful, but he was quite seriously affected, so they're keeping him sedated until the nerves are fully healed."

The Cruciatus curse. Right. And Jace had just—just _stood_ there and fucking _watched_ as Ral—as he screamed—

And there it all was, preserved in perfect sound and color in his memory whenever he felt like going back for it. "But he's gonna be okay, right?"

"Almost certainly." _Almost_. Jace felt sick.

"What about Elspeth? And Nissa? Are—are they—"

"They both woke up yesterday. They're still a little weak, but nothing worse than a bad flu." Jace felt his shoulders slump a little, and Professor Granger patted his shoulder reassuringly. "We were more worried about you than about anyone else."

"Me?" Jace echoed in confusion. "Why?" They shouldn't have worried about him. This whole mess was his fault, after all. His stomach turned over as he remembered commandeering Teysa's head. Not that he'd really had much of a choice by that time, but it was still—not the greatest thing he'd ever done.

Professor Granger's eyebrows went up. "Perhaps you don't realize this, Jace, but you were in a coma. Again. Ms. Karloff spent three days trying to sort out her memories from yours—" Jace winced, "—and since you'd clearly done some complex legilimency with her and, according to her, with Vess, _after_ throwing off the effects of an extremely complex and powerful love potion, we were afraid you might be—damaged. Possibly irreparably."

Why hadn't anyone noticed the potion earlier? Did Jace just normally act the way he'd been acting? He was pretty sure that wasn't true. Maybe no one cared enough. It had been a few years since he'd felt like that, but the sick feeling was rising in his stomach again, and he scrunched his eyes shut. "Yeah, well, I'm fine," he said shortly, swallowing down all the other words in a painful lump. Ral had cared. Ral had cared, and now he was—

Jace swiped an arm across his eyes, and then thought of something else. "Where's Kallist?" he demanded. "What did she do to him?" He couldn't remember what excuse Liliana had given him, but he knew he hadn't seen the little cloud in the entire semester.

"Would you like to see him? We just didn't want him raining all over your hospital bed while you were unconscious."

"Yeah."

"I think Mirko would also like to check on you, if you don't mind."

Jace's brain threw up the fuzzy memory of standing still as Mirko was banished, and he gulped in another sudden breath of panic. "Mirko—"

"—helped put your mind back together after this whole mess," Professor Granger told him firmly.

"They're okay, too? But weren't they—b-banished?"

"Teysa and Chandra told us they were, but they reconstituted with what seemed to be all their memories, somehow. I don't think anyone's asked them yet." She cracked a faint smile. "It's been a bit busy around here."

"Yeah, I'll see them," Jace said, breathing a guilty sigh of relief that he hadn't just stood there and watched while one of his closest friends had _died_.

"And I'm sure your mother will want to see you as well. She was up with you all last night, and she's still asleep."

 _Ranna_. "Did—Liliana—did she put my mum under—"

Because if _anyone_ should have noticed he was acting oddly, it was his mum.

"She's fine, Jace," Professor Granger said evasively, and Jace sat up and reached for the hood of his cloak, but she put her hands over his. "Jace. Don't."

"Then _tell_ me."

Professor Granger frowned. "You have to promise not to use legilimency until the healers say you can."

Jace's lips thinned. "No," he said tautly. "I'm not promising fucking _anything_. I'm not going to do what someone else says, I don't care what happens to me, it's not like _you_ cared enough to _notice_ —" He cut himself off, because he was _not_ going to fucking cry right now. He just wasn't.

There was a soft intake of breath. "All right," Professor Granger said. "You don't have to promise, Jace. But please consider your mother's feelings before you do something that runs the risk of damaging your mind."

"…fine," he muttered into the covers.

"Ranna was under a befuddlement charm, quite a strong one. She did not have a good reaction to it, but she is fine. All right?"

So he'd gotten his mother hurt as well. Of course. Jace wanted to kick and scream and punch. He wanted to bite through the flesh of his hands, rip his cloak off and just let himself dissolve into everyone around him. Some little insistent voice in the back of his head held him back from doing any of that, and instead, he just nodded shortly. "Yeah, okay. Can I see Kallist and Mirko now?"

A pause. Professor Granger sighed. "Yes, Jace."

 _And then I'm getting out of here_. Kallist and Mirko would help him, Jace was sure, and he suddenly couldn't stand being in the Hospital Wing any longer. He needed to be somewhere where he didn't feel as if people were trying to keep him still, were hovering over him and _watching_ —now, _now_ they were, when no one had been there earlier. When no one had seen anything wrong, except—except Ral, and Ral—

 _He's going to be okay. He's got to be okay._

If Ral wasn't okay, Jace thought bleakly, he was never going to be okay again. Ever.

* * *

Hermione put her head into her hands. This was a mess. Everything was a mess. She'd never seen Jace so _angry_ before. He was usually the quiet one. It wasn't as if he was a model student, but he didn't usually get angry the way some of the other students—Ral especially—did. He was hurting terribly—no wonder—and she had no idea how to help.

A pair of soft hands landed on her shoulders. "Hermione?"

"Morning." She leaned backward miserably. "Oh, Luna. I don't know what to do. They're all hurt so badly, and we should have _protected_ them. I should have kept them safe." She pressed the palms of her hands into her eyes.

"Me, too," Luna whispered. "I'm a professor too, Hermione."

"You don't know Jace or Ral. I thought it was just the usual teenage drama, and I _shouldn't have_. I should have pressed harder when Ral got upset about it, but I thought—oh, I don't know." She shut her eyes against the feeling, but it only got worse. "I don't think Jace will ever trust me again," she sniffed. "I've known him since he was _five_ , Luna, and I—I wanted to adopt him, and he—he'll never trust me again, and, honestly, I don't blame him! I wouldn't trust me again!"

Ron, back when they were dating, would have protested. Would have told Hermione that it wasn't her fault or some other such nonsense. Luna didn't say anything. She just leaned forward and pressed her cheek into Hermione's, and held her, arms crossed over the front of Hermione's chest. Another sob welled out of Hermione's throat.

"People don't trust people because they deserve it," Luna said slowly. "We just have to help Jace now."

"But _how_?" Hermione asked wildly. "Oh, Merlin, if I knew _how_ to help, I would do it! I'd do anything, I really would. But this is…this is so…"

"Maybe we could ask Ginny what helped her?"

"Ginny?"

"Well, you know, she did say to me that the year she was possessed by Voldemort was quite bad, and I know she still has nightmares about it, of course, but she's doing rather well, all things considered." Luna pressed her lips into Hermione's hair.

"Yes, I suppose it couldn't hurt." Hermione sniffed again and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. "I really must stop feeling so sorry for myself. I just need to figure out what Jace needs right now."

She firmly pushed away the raw, appalled feeling of guilt and hurt and the prick of _he will never trust you again_ and sat up. "Yes," she managed briskly. "Let's owl Ginny. It definitely can't hurt. And—and we'll talk to Ranna, now that she's feeling better and Jace is awake."

"Hermione—oh, thank goodness." It was Madam Pomfrey, frowning, worried.

Hermione's heart leapt into her throat. Everyone had been doing so much better—had Ral taken a turn for the worse? Had— "What is it, Poppy?"

"Mr. Beleren is gone."

 _Oh no._ Hermione shut her eyes. "All right. Get hold of Harry and Draco—" she was relatively sure she remembered someone telling her they'd gotten back at some point in the past twelve hours, but she'd been too busy checking on the students in the Hospital Wing to interface with them, "—get hold of everyone. We've got to find him."

"We will." Luna squeezed her shoulder. "We'll find him."

* * *

Elspeth blinked her eyes open. She'd been drifting in and out of consciousness for several days now, during which time she'd managed to gather a fair bit about what had been going on since she'd collapsed at her Quidditch match. The experience was incredibly frustrating. Every time she started feeling guilty about not listening to Ral when he'd been thoroughly and utterly vindicated, she fell asleep again. She would have been furious with herself if she'd had the energy for it.

This time, although she was still tired enough that she didn't feel like getting out of the bed, she was at least clearheaded enough to not want to fall back to sleep. For several minutes, she lay and breathed and enjoyed the sensation of being aware of things around her. She could hear cloth shifting somewhere beside her, and after another few minutes, she turned her head to the side.

Teysa was looking back at her, face open with surprise.

"Hello," Elspeth said weakly.

"H-hi," her penpal stammered back. "How are you feeling?"

She was perched on one of the ugly hospital chairs, one leg drawn up beneath her and the other not quite reaching the ground. She seemed even smaller in person than she had in her picture, somehow.

"Still tired." Digging her elbow into the bed, Elspeth slowly started propping herself up. It wasn't easy, but she managed. "What are you doing here?" No, wait, that was a silly question, she'd heard enough snatches of conversation to know. "You came because you were worried about me."

Teysa opened her mouth and took in a quick breath. "I—well, yes."

"I'd say this is unusual, but it's really not. You already sort of know that, though." They'd been penpals for long enough that Teysa was privy to quite a number of the more dangerous stunts that Jace and Ral had pulled over the years. Elspeth thought, rather sanctimoniously, that she had at least not _instigated_ any of those, and then thought again about Ral trying to make anyone listen to him, and writhed.

"It is a bit unusual," Teysa said softly.

Elspeth nodded, turning her face to the side so that the pillow would catch the tears. "How are Ral and Jace?" she asked.

"Ral's—okay. He's not awake, but they said that's mostly because they haven't let him. His nerves need time to heal, or he would have a very unpleasant few days."

"And Jace?" Elspeth pressed uneasily.

Teysa shrugged. "Last I heard, he hadn't woken up yet. He, um, left some bits in my head."

That didn't sound good. "What bits?" Elspeth asked nervously.

"Mostly good bits," Teysa said, with a wave of her hand. "I know how it feels to do magic, now. But…" she chewed on her lip. "Well, I may have added to my stock of really terrible memories. I already had quite a number of those."

Elspeth pulled a face. "Yeah, I've seen a few of Jace's memories," she said quietly. "He shouldn't have to deal with them. Nobody else should, either."

"Don't worry about me." Teysa leaned forward and gingerly patted Elspeth's hand. "I'm good at taking care of myself. I've been doing it for a while."

"Of course." Smiling, Elspeth took Teysa's hand. That much was probably all right, at least.

"Can I hug you?" Definitely all right, then. Elspeth nodded. Grunting, Teysa shifted herself forward so that she could get down from the chair and kneel on the bed.

"I was so worried," she admitted softly as Elspeth gathered her in her arms. She was so small that Elspeth could rest her chin on Teysa's head, although partly that was because Teysa was pushing her face into Elspeth's chest. "You—you are one of my only friends, and I thought I was going to lose you. I would have killed the witch if I could."

"So would I." Elspeth looked up. Jace, trembling, his cloak pulled tight around him, stood in the doorway, Kallist hovering directly overhead. A blurred figure hovering behind him had to be Mirko. "But then I guess we both tried to. I'm so sorry, both of you."

"Jace!" Elspeth exclaimed. "Oh, Merlin! How are you feeling?"

"Oh, um, I'm fine," Jace said vaguely. "Would you mind if I used your window?"

Elspeth blinked at him. "My…window?" she repeated.

"I, um, I really would like to not be here anymore. In the room. In the hospital wing, I mean."

"Are you sure…" Elspeth trailed off uncertainly. Jace looked exhausted. There were huge, dark circles beneath his eyes, and his face was pale and gaunt, as if he'd been sick for weeks.

"Yeah, I just. I feel. I feel trapped. Please."

She was nodding almost before he'd finished the sentence, because Jace should _not_ have that raw, frightened note of pleading in his voice. He hadn't sounded this small and afraid in years. Teysa slid across the bed and undid the window by hand. "Here. Just be careful, all right?"

"Mmm," Jace assented, and Elspeth really hoped he'd heard her.

"Jace," she said quickly.

"Huh?" He turned as he stepped up onto the window ledge, Kallist floating above him and Mirko behind him.

" _I'm_ sorry. I should've listened to Ral."

For an instant, Jace's face crumpled, tears welling up in his eyes, and he gulped in a sob. Then he shut his eyes and stepped backwards. Elspeth's stomach jumped into her throat before she heard him say, " _Wingardium leviosa_ ," catching himself before he'd fallen more than a foot or so.

"Where are you going?" Elspeth asked. "I mean, if—can I ask that?" He was so skittish right now.

"Mmm. Astronomy Tower, I think." Jace sounded distracted. "Uh, I guess you can tell Professor Malfoy if he asks, but don't tell anyone else, please?"

"I won't. I promise."

He nodded jerkily and disappeared from view below the window. Elspeth found herself staring after him. "Oh, damn," she said suddenly, pressing her hands to her eyes. "Oh, damn, damn, _damn_."

"You can cry if you need to," Teysa said in a small voice. "I cried a lot, actually. Although I'm not exactly sure if I was the one crying the whole time."

Elspeth sniffed and brushed the tears away, decided she wasn't quite ready to have a good cry just yet, and rested her head on Teysa's shoulder. "Everything is awful," she said. "It's so awful."

"Jace is awake," Teysa pointed out, "Ral is doing better, Jace is out of my head, and I'm here now. I even got to use magic."

"Still."

"Yes, it's not great." She sighed, and one hand brushed gently against Elspeth's cheek. "I don't know your friends, not really. I know you—a bit—but I don't know you as well as I should. I should have visited you much earlier than this, but, well, I—"

"You can't do magic, and you didn't want to feel out of place at Hogwarts. You said, I got it, I never expected you to come out here." Elspeth reached out, found Teysa's hand, and interlaced their fingers. "I'm just glad you're here _now_."

"I should have been here earlier." Teysa was pensive. "Not because I could possibly have known about this—" And Elspeth felt an unpleasant twinge, because _she_ should've known. She should've listened to Ral. "But because I've been living in my own little bubble for too long. Everything you sent me about this summer sounded _fantastic_."

"You'd like it." Elspeth smiled, thinking about Teysa wearing Muggle clothes, going on an outing with her and Ral to the mall. "You'd _love_ it."

"Maybe we can talk about something like that once things get a bit, well, better."

"Yeah," Teysa agreed.

They leaned against one another, and Elspeth was starting to feel drowsy again—so she probably still needed some time to recover—when someone knocked on the door.

Teysa glanced over and waited for Elspeth to nod before calling out, "Come in!"

It was Professor Granger, looking worried. "Have either of you seen Jace?" she asked. Elspeth found herself glancing over at Teysa, but Teysa's face was smooth and unconcerned. Elspeth herself felt faintly sick and worried, and she wasn't about to lie to a professor, but she wasn't going to do anything Jace didn't want, either.

So she said, "Is Professor Malfoy there?"


End file.
